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Are We Alone? — The Search for Extraterrestrial Life in the Solar SystemKathleen Campbell Little Green (Wo)Men are out; microbes are in. The search for life beyond Earth has recently accelerated since the lull following the Mars Viking missions in the 1970’s. Both the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ and Icy Worlds are receiving intense scrutiny. This talk will explore what, how and why in the quest for ET life in the Solar System in the current and coming decades.
Our guest speakerKathy Campbell Professor Kathy Campbell is a geologist and astrobiologist who investigates extreme environments as analogues for early life on Earth and possible life on Mars. She studied Earth Science at the University of California (Santa Cruz; Hons major), University of Washington (MSc), University of Southern California (PhD), and undertook post-doctoral research at NASA Ames Research Center before joining The University of Auckland (UOA) in 1997. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Ap?rangi, and is founding Director of Te Ao M?rama – Centre for Fundamental Inquiry, a transdisciplinary research centre in the Faculty of Science at UOA exploring the origin and evolution of the Universe and its life. Kathy was a senior research fellow at the Le Studium Institute for Advanced Studies (Orléans, France, 2014), and a distinguished lecturer in international astrobiology schools in Spain (Santander, 2016) and Thailand (Chiang Mai, 2019). In NASA’s Mars 2020 landing site selection, her team’s proposal made it to the final three, with the aim to collect samples of possible Martian biosignatures from a >3 billion year old putative hot spring deposit at Columbia Hills in Gusev Crater, and their return to Earth in a future mission. She teaches paleoecology, sedimentology and astrobiology at UOA and conducts research with students and collaborators in Australia, Japan, the U.S., UK, France, Argentina and New Zealand.
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