National Geographic News, Reporting Your World Daily

Monday, November 9, 2009

Photo: Alien Life Can Survive Trip to Earth, Space Test Shows


Email to a Friend	<< Back to Full Story

The European Space Agency's spherical Foton M3 capsule (top) landed in the Kazakh desert on September 26 with an artificial meteorite attached to its exterior.

Some of the biological material in the baseball-size meteorite (bottom right) survived reentry into Earth's atmosphere, even after most of the meteorite was destroyed (bottom left).

The finding lends credibility to the idea that extraterrestrial organisms arriving on meteorites may have influenced the development of life on Earth, some scientists say.

Photographs courtesy Paula Lindgren (University of Aberdeen), Rene Demets (European Space Agency), and Franz Brandstatter (Vienna)