Checking for Life on Mars
Researchers, funded by NASA, are perfecting a tool that could look for the slightest traces of life’s molecular building blocks on Mars and could also decide if they have been created by anything alive. Urey (sic) the Mars Organic and Oxidant Detector is the instrument that has already shown capabilities in the Atacarna Desert in Chile, one of the most barren climes on Earth.
The European Space Agency has selected the Urey from the United States as part of the science payload for the ExoMars rover which is planned for launching in 2013. NASA has chosen Urey for an instrument-development investment of $750,000.00. The ExoMars rover will grind samples of Martian soil to fine powder as planned by the European Space Agency. The samples will be delivered to a group of analytical instruments, including Urey to determine if there are signs of life. Each sample will consist of a spoonful of material that has been dug from underground by a robotic drill.
Dr. Jeffrey Bada of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego is the principal investigator for an international team of scientists and engineers working on various components of the device. He said, “Urey will be able to detect key molecules associated with life at a sensitivity roughly a million times greater than previous instrumentation.” ExoMars will be searching for life while Urey is the instrument with the highest sensitivity for organic chemicals. Several types of organic molecules, such as amino acids can be detected by the instrument at concentrations as low as a few parts per trillion.
Allen Farrington, Urey project manager ag NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said ” The Urey instrument will be able to distinguish between left-handed amino acids and right-handed ones.” The Laboratory will build the instrument to be sent to Mars. Life, as we know it, would not be found on Mars. iI Urey would find an even mix of the mirror-image molecules on Mars. However, all-left or all-right molecules would be strong evidence that life exists on Mars.
During the 1976 NASA Viking it was discovered that strongly oxidizing conditions at the Martian surface complicated experiments when searching for life. A component, called the Mars Oxidant instrument located on Urey will examine these conditions. The oxidant instrument has microsensors coated with various chemical films. The reaction of the sensor films with chemicals found in the Martian soil and atmosphere is measured and it can be determined if organisms could survive and if evidence of past life would be preserved. Dr. Aaron Zent, a Urey co-investigator at NASA said, “We need to improve our understanding of oxidants in the planet’s surface environment.” This will improve our chances of finding chemical evidence of life on the red planet.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 5:57 am 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.
