Astrobiology can be defined as ‘the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the Universe’. Striving to understand the emergence of life on our own planet and the possibility of it surviving in extraterrestrial locations is necessarily a very broad area of multidisciplinary investigation, reaching across aspects of astronomy, planetary sciences, geology, biology, and the design and engineering of space probes. This field of science is sometimes also called exobiology, xenobiology or bioastronomy.