Franck Selsis – författare

The search for life outside the Earth has been one of the biggest quests of mankind. We have reached a level in technology that allows the first steps towards a scientific investigation. The aim of this workshop was to take an interdisciplinary look at the signatures that would be indicative for past or present life on another planet, to compare them to biosignatures on Earth, and to discuss state-of-the-art in-situ instruments that are envisioned to search for these signatures in the exploration of the solar system as well as concepts for the search for habitable planets around other stars.

J. L. Bada*J. Gomez-Elvira*E. Javaux*M. Rosing* F. Selsis*R. Summons*R. M. Bonnet*O. Botta Originally published in the journal Space Science Reviews, Volume 135, Nos 1-4. DOI: 10. 1007/s11214-008-9328-1 (c) Springer Science+Business Media B. V. 2008 Twooftheoverarchingquestionsaskedinthepursuitofscienti c knowledgeare:(1)Isthere life outside the Earth? and (2) How did life originate on the Earth? Not coincidently, these questions are major milestones on the roadmap of the new interdisciplinary science eld of Astrobiology. A signi cant part in the quest for answers to these questions requires the involvement of space exploration, either in the form of the deployment of planetary probes to various target objects in the Solar System or of the construction of large telescopes and spectrometers in various orbits around the Earth or the Sun. It does not come as a surprise that space agencies such as NASA or ESA have established programs in support of these missions as well as the development of instruments.In the case of planetary probes, which in the current epoch are mainly focusing on the exploration of Mars, but also include missions to asteroids and comets, the development of in-situ instruments to search for traces of past J. L. Bada Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD, La Jolla, CA, USA J. Gomez-Elvira Centro de Astrobiologia (INTA-CSIC), Madrid, Spain E. Javaux University of Liege, Liege, Belgium M. Rosing Geological Museum Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark F. Selsis University of Lyon, Lyon, France R. Summons Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA R. M. Bonnet* O.

Over the past ten years, the discovery of extrasolar planets has opened a new field of astronomy, and this area of research is rapidly growing, from both the observational and theoretical point of view. The presence of many giant exoplanets in the close vicinity of their star shows that these newly discovered planetary systems are very different from the solar system. New theoretical models are being developed in order to understand their formation scenarios, and new observational methods are being implemented to increase the sensitivity of exoplanet detections.In the present book, the authors address the question of planetary systems from all aspects. Starting from the facts (the detection of more than 300 extraterrestrial planets), they first describe the various methods used for these discoveries and propose a synthetic analysis of their global properties. They then consider the observations of young stars and circumstellar disks and address the case of the solar system as a specific example, different from the newly discovered systems. Then the study of planetary systems and of exoplanets is presented from a more theoretical point of view. The book ends with an outlook to future astronomical projects, and a description of the search for life on exoplanets. This book addresses students and researchers who wish to better understand this newly expanding field of research.