The Black Vault - Cyber lab brewing up new planets

(CNN) -- Biologists, astronomers and computer scientists are working together to construct planets from scratch to explore the variety of physical bodies that could host life.

The ingredients for the new world stew will be mixed in a virtual laboratory managed by NASA, which would like to figure out what to look for when it launches planet-finding missions in the coming years.

By simulating a range of planets, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, hopes to narrow the search to habitable planets.

"We're trying to build a terrestrial planet inside a computer," said Vikki Meadows, main project scientist at the Virtual Planetary Laboratory.

"This will help us determine what the signatures of life on an extra-solar planet will look like, once we have the technology to study them," she said earlier this month.

Over the next several years, Meadows and dozens of colleagues will tap the power of numerous supercomputers to fashion cyber-worlds and simulate their atmospheric conditions.

The cyber world data could come in handy when NASA launches the next generation of space telescopes, including the Terrestrial Planet Finder.

This month, NASA named scientists and engineers to a working group that will hammer out the technology used in the TPF mission, which the space agency hopes to launch within a decade or so.

Frozen hells, burning hells

Astronomers hope the TPL will be so powerful that it can detect the planets themselves.

Breaking down the light from distant planets into spectral components could provide crucial information about their chemistry, perhaps revealing whether they can or do harbor life.

What would such a bio-signature look like? There is only one prototype for guidance, Earth.

JPL scientists think they can expand the possibilities by considering data from planetary neighbors like Mars and Venus, and play around with different sizes, compositions, orbits and temperatures.

"We'll model everything from frozen hells to burning hells," Meadows said.

So far, astronomers can deduce the presence of planets only through indirect means, such as when they periodically dim or gravitationally tug on parent stars.

The hundred or so planets discovered in other star systems have been limited to gas giants, distant cousins of Saturn or Jupiter, because of the technological limitations.

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