Discovering the role that ultraviolet rays played in making Earth a habitable planet, and whether something similar may have happened on Mars as well as on planets orbiting other stars: this is what the astrobiology project funded by the Italian Space Agency and led by the University of Rome Tor Vergata intends to do. Also participating in the project called Asteria is the aerospace company Kayser Italia, with the development of a prototype device to monitor the viability of cyanobacteria exposed to ultraviolet radiation, enabling the acquisition of useful data and knowledge needed for future experiments in space. The investigation of the boundaries of life and the contexts in which it might manifest itself beyond Earth is one of the great open challenges in modern science, requiring close collaboration between biologists and astrophysicists.
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