Early in the next decade, NASA plans to launch the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which will search for Earth-like planets around other stars and analyze them for telltale signs of life. The problem is, nobody knows how to recognize habitable worlds and to distinguish between planets with and without life. So the NASA Astrobiology Institute has recently launched the Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL)–a five-year project to simulate the environments and spectra of extrasolar planets. These models will be the first to combine the radiative fluxes, climate, chemistry, geology and biology of a terrestrial planet, to generate a wide range of plausible atmospheres for extrasolar planets, and for the atmospheres of early Earth. Space.com is running a story about this project, in which they interview Dr. Victoria Meadows, leader of JPL’s astrobiology research team
who oversees the VPL from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.