Ames Research Center Exobiology in Earth Orbit

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Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. One might think that the origin of life is strictly a biological question, to be attacked by experiments in Earth-based laboratories. That is largely true. But the chemical processes that operated over the eons of remote geological time to produce the first reproducing organisms occurred in the terrestrial environment of that time - and that environment was established by the processes that led to the formation and chemical evolution of the Earth itself. The traces of such processes to be found on the Earth today are studied by Earth scientists, and there is much to be learned of relevance to the origin of life.