Suzan Mazur's interview of Chris McKay bears the descriptive title NASA Humanist Chris McKay: Where Darwinism Fails. McKay is a scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center where he researches the evolution of the solar system as well as the origin of life. From the linked article:

Suzan Mazur: What about other mechanisms of evolution, self-organization and self-assembly? They precede natural selection?

Chris McKay: Something had to precede Darwinian natural selection. The Darwinian paradigm breaks down in two obvious ways.

First, and most clear, Darwinian selection cannot be responsible for the origin of life. Secondly, there is some thought that Darwinian selection cannot fully explain the rise of complexity at the molecular level.

Suzan Mazur: So you're saying Darwinian natural selection sets in at what point?

Chris McKay: I think it must set in after life has started. After there's a genome, genotype. That's the one obvious place where Darwinian natural selection fails - is in the origin of life. It can't be Darwinian all the way down.

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We are continually discovering and classifying planetary systems beyond our own solar system. These efforts can lead to the discovery of exotic formations. Solar systems like ours likely to be rarer than we thought contains this paragraph:

Astronomers, to their obvious delight, have discovered some 250 planetary systems beyond our own, many of them with curious properties. In particular, the discovery of several “hot Jupiters” gas giants that orbit close to their parent stars, challenges our theories of planet formation. The thinking is that gas giants can only form far away from stars because gas and dust simply gets blown away from the inner regions.

Data gathered from the study of other solar systems can influence theories as to how our solar system formed. Another quote:

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The search for life beyond earth continues. NASA Now Looking for Life's Building Blocks on Mars has this to say:

Phoenix scientists announced yesterday that the mission finally confirmed the presence of subsurface water ice in the north polar regions of Mars — first detected by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter in 2002 — about two months after touching down on the Martian surface on May 25.

The lander is now analyzing the ice to see if it was ever a liquid and if it contains organic materials, the building blocks of life.

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