The Habitable Zone General concept referring to a region of space where conditions are sufficient to initiate life

Extremophiles – Life is found on Earth in environments not previously thought to contain life.

Antarctic endoliths are extremophile life forms. They have adapted to the most severe conditions no other life can handle

Our Solar System – A brief tour…

MERCURY

The Spider Radial Troughs within Caloris Basin

Venus

EARTH

Meteor Crater, located in northern Arizona on the North American continent, is one of the most recent and well-preserved impact crater sites on Earth. (Image Credit: Michael Ramsey)

“Just like an eagle can fly into the Grand Canyon, my vision was for the visitors to walk the path of the eagle, and become surrounded by the Grand Canyon…My dream was to find a balance between form, function and nature.” –David Jin, Hualapai Tribe

MARS

Olympus MonsOlympus Mons

Valles Marineris

Water?, maybe… so what??

Before and after images of a trench on Mars dug by NASA’s Phoenix lander. The possible ice can be seen in the bottom-left of the trench in the photo on the left, but not in the photo on the right, which was taken four Martian days later.

PHOBOS

Asteroid Belt Deimos

The Asteroid Belt Ceres

Jupiter

Io 4 Galilean moons of Jupiter

Europa

Callisto

Ganymede

Saturn

Mysterious storms at Saturn’s poles

Enceladus

Titan

Above Titan’s surface

Uranus

Triton Ice volcanoes Thin atmosphere

Neptune

Pluto and Charon

Eris

Kuiper Belt Kuiper belt – belt of icy, rocky dusty material leftover from the formation of the solar system. Most comets originate from this broad region past the orbit of Neptune reaching farther than 55 AU from the Sun.

Oort Cloud - it is theorized that our solar system is surrounded by debris at the gravitational extent of our solar system. The oort cloud is rumored to be 50,000 AU to a light year in distance, making it ¼ of the distance to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.