Agency’s Long Duration Exposure Facility indicate

During the nineteenth century, when steady-state cosmological theories were in vogue, Lord Kelvin, Svante Arrhenius, and other eminent scien-tists believed that the transfer of life from one planet to another was a process made inevitable by the infinite extent and duration of the universe. This hypothesis, known as panspermia, subse-quently fell out of favor, partly as a result of the acceptance of the Big Bang theory. Most efforts to understand the origin of life have since been framed by the assumption that life began on Earth. However, in the last decade data have begun to accumulate suggesting that panspermia may in fact be a natural and frequently occurring process. Recent paleomagnetic studies on Martian meteor-ite ALH84001 have shown that this rock traveled from Mars to Earth without its interior becoming warmer than 40ºC (Weiss et al. 2000) (Fig. 1). Experiments aboard the European Spac