ESA’s “Pregnancy Test” May be Used to Discover Life on Mars
“This mission will be an important stepping stone in our ultimate goal of putting a LMC experiment on the surface of Mars and using it to search for evidence of life,” said Mark Sims, an LMC mission manager at University of Leicester in the U.K.
Searching for life on Mars is still very much in its experimental stages, with a new experiment exposed to space since last Friday, September 14, 2007, an experiment which is harboring more than 2,000 life-detecting samples. Similar to a pregnancy test, the European Space Agency’s experiment is the size of a small postage-stamp, launched from a Russian rocked that lifted-off at Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. The little package was strapped to the large Foton-M3 capsule, with samples that glowed if life-critical compounds, such as proteins or DNA, were encountered.
Scientists and mission engineers are hoping that the life experiment, part of the Foton-M3 capsule, will stand up to the space radiation, temperatures, and vacuum of the Martian trip. “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,” said Andrew Steele, a molecular biologist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. Similar to the original pregnancy test, the LMC experiment uses color-changing chemicals that will pick up traces of hormones that increase in numbers after conception. The Foton-M3 mission will return to Earth on September 25, 2007 in a location near the Russia-Kazakhstan border.
If possible, the managers of the experiment will strap their “pregnancy test device”, it successful, aboard the “ExoMars”—a robotic rover mission of ESA’s which is to be launched in 2013. The testing will be able to detect traces of past or present martian life with the “lab-on-a-chip”.
Ten other experiments on board the Foton-M3 capsule, they are located in the BIOPAN-6 compartment on the outside of the Foton-M3 capsuel. Once the satellite, the Soyuz-U rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, reached stable orbit on Friday, the BIOPAN-6 opened the hatch while exposed all ten experiments to space for a period of 12 days.
More technically, the BIOPAN is a pan-shaped container for biological experiments in space, fitted on the outside of the FOTON spacecraft that carries experiments totaling 3.5 kg in mass. A motor-driven lid can be opened and the experiments are automatically exposed to solar light, cosmic rays, radiation, vacuum, and ranges of temperatures. The important thing is that the BIOPAN has the ability to monitor the experiment’s space environment, through solar sensors, thermometers, and investigator-provided radiation detectors.
This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 12:36 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.
