ESA’s “Pregnancy Test” Used to Discover Life on Mars – Part II
Dr. Andrew Steele from the Carnegie Institution of Washington (USA) and one of the initial experiment proposers said, “in the USA we are currently flying related technology and components within the protected environment of the International Space Station (ISS) but this will be the first time that these types of materials will have flown unprotected in space in a manner similar to a flight to Mars.”
Over the years since it was first developed, the BIOPAN has become accommodating with heavier and more complex experiments, with upgraded sensors, with added power in order to record the experiments. According to “Advances in Space Research”. Vol 36 Issue 2, the BIOPAN has been designed and manufactured under the ESA contract by Kayser-Threde (Germany) with Kayser Italia (Italy) and TsSKB-Progress (Russia) as subcontractors.
Recognized as a tool for investigators, in 2001 NASA had proposed a similar technology in home pregnancy tests to one day search for proposed signs of past or present life on Mars. The NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) worked on the Mars Immunoassay Life Detection Instrument (MILDI), which is a tiny biochip packed with thousands of antibodies. To simplify things, NASA refers to the MILDI as a home pregnancy test kit which uses antibodies to detect hormones—but in space the scientist have developed a similar “pregnancy” method which uses antibodies to react to specific molecules that react to living organisms. Now, the issue is to decide which molecules that will need to be recognized as “living organisms”.
One the tests come back from space, possibly a chemical sign to be recognized is “porphyrins”, which is what all Earth life forms use. Another one is hopanes, which are the remnants of cell walls that are left by ancient bacteria. And of course, there are the traces of the double helix structure of DNA or similar molecules. Greg Schmidt, head of the NASA Astrobiology Integration Office, says that oxidants on the Mars’ surface has probably destroyed all organics, which explains why the future missions are planning on drilling below the Martian surface in order to get under the oxidants.
Dave McKay at the Johnson Space Center and British environmental microbiologist Andrew Steele - both members of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI)—stated in a 2001 NASA report that the test would depend on the fact that the project is based on the assumption that Mars has the same identical prebiotic chemicals as Earth. If so, it is expected that there may be some parallels in simple chemistry of any Martian organism to that of terrestrial organisms.
This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 11:19 pm and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
