A PhD student and his supervisor have developed a simple way for testing for active life on Mars and other planets using equipment already on the Mars Curiosity rover and planned for future use on the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover.
There is enormous interest in the possibility of past or present life beyond Earth, with space agencies spending a great deal of time and money exploring suitable extraterrestrial homes and searching for signals of life.
PhD student Solomon Hirsch and his supervisor Professor Mark Sephton, from Imperial College London’s Department of Earth Science & Engineering, have realised that an existing instrument could be used to detect signs of life at a fraction of the cost of developing new missions and instruments.
It has the potential to be used to detect living organisms on other planets or moons.The instrument, called a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GC-MS), has been installed on Martian probes since the mid-1970s with early versions on the Viking I and Viking II landers. Solomon and Mark determined that it could be used to detect a chemical bond within cell membrane molecules that are found in many living, and very recently deceased, organisms.
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