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.
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?
