“The article, co-authored by Associate Professor André Antunes and entitled ‘Experimental and Simulation Efforts in the Astrobiological Exploration of Exooceans’, is the culmination of the work carried out by an international transdisciplinary team, which collected experimental and modeling studies from various scientific areas connected exploration of the oceans of the icy moons of the Solar System “, reads the MUST statement.
The university adds that “this contribution is seen as particularly relevant for the next phase of the exploration of the moons Europa and Enceladus, and for the search for life”.
In July 2020, Macau researchers, one of whom André Antunes, told Lusa that they were helping China land on Mars, study radiation and search for water and life on the planet.
One of the challenges for the State Reference Laboratory for Lunar and Planetary Science at the University of Science and Technology of Macau (MUST) is to ensure that the Chinese exploration module that is part of the mission launched in July 2020 will land safely in surface of the red planet, something that only the United States has yet achieved.
Not being the primary objective, André Antunes summarized, at the time, one of the questions and motivation that “feeds” the mission and concern of the laboratory scientists in Macau: “From the point of view of discovery, what we would like to have more of mid-term [seria] the discovery of life on Mars or evidence that life once existed on Mars “.
After all, argued the Coimbra natural researcher, “from the point of view of the capacity to house life (…), contrary to what was originally thought with the first missions (…), the conditions existing on Mars are not like that so extreme, they are not that different from the conditions we have on our own planet “.
MIM (JMC) // PNG
Lusa / End
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