NASA announced 5-year grants adding up to nearly $50 million for seven research groups across the U .S. to study life in the universe and its origins, distribution, evolution and future.

Each of the research teams will be awarded about $8 million and will be affiliated with NASA's Astrobiology Institute headquartered at the space agency's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

The teams cover all areas of astrobiology and by their affiliation with NAI will create connection the can stimulate fundamental advances in the field, says Mary Voytek, the director of astrobiology programs NASA Headquarters.

"The intellectual scope of astrobiology is vast, from understanding how our planet went from lifeless to living, to understanding how life has adapted to Earth's harshest environments, to exploring other worlds with the most advanced technologies to search for signs of life," she says.

The selected teams include:

• NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, investigating comets and the other small solar system bodies thought to have brought water and building block molecules that created life to Earth.

• NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, to discover and describe the chemistry that would have created organic molecules from those building blocks.

• NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where a team will investigate various environments around the Earth to gauge the habitability of extraterrestrial icy worlds like several moons around Jupiter and Saturn.

• The SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., which will formulate guiding principles to determine where the search for life should be directed, what evidence to look for, and how to recognize that evidence of past or currently existing life if found.

• The University of Colorado in Boulder, which will study rocky planets where massive amounts of chemical energy released in the interaction between rocks with water might power living systems scientists call "Rock-Powered Life."

• The University of California, Riverside, which will look at the history of oxygen levels in Earth's atmosphere oceans between 3.2 billion years ago, when amounts were almost nothing, to 0.7 billion years ago when it reached the levels present today.

• The University of Montana in Missoula, where researchers will try to explains the transition of life from small "units" exhibiting simple chemical reactions to self-organizing and self-reproducing energy-gathering systems.

"With the Curiosity rover characterizing the potential habitability of Mars, the Kepler mission discovering new planets outside our solar system, and Mars 2020 on the horizon, these research teams will provide the critical interdisciplinary expertise to help interpret data from these missions and future astrobiology-focused missions," said Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters, Washington D.C.