
Looking Back At Earth: LCROSS Spacecraft Detects Life On The Blue Planet - vaksel
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090806091014.htm
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fhars
While this may sound silly (NASA detects life of earth!) it is actually a
nontrivial feat to detect the presence of life on a planet if you are
sufficiently far away from it. So the fact that they were able to detect signs
of life from about as far away as the moon is an interesting datapoint for the
sensitivity of the instruments on board. This is the kind of calibration you
should do if you want to study other planets.

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spyrosk
_During the Earth observations, the spacecraft's spectrometers were able to
detect the signatures of the Earth's water, ozone, methane, oxygen, carbon
dioxide and possibly vegetation._

I'm sorry but I don't get how they detected life on Earth. I can
accept/imagine a few ways for tracing various chemicals/elements on a planet's
surface and atmosphere from space but how can one detect life? Not only that
but the reporter says "and _possibly_ vegetation". So their results aren't
conclusive?

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asmithmd1
The mission has a Facebook page: [http://www.facebook.com/pages/LCROSS-Lunar-
Impactor-Mission/...](http://www.facebook.com/pages/LCROSS-Lunar-Impactor-
Mission/154478180006)

Hasn't anyone told NASA that Facebook is so last season? The probe should be
Twittering.

~~~
andrewf
It does. In first person _groan_

<http://twitter.com/Lcross_Nasa>

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chanux
So now it's confirmed: Life on earth :)

