NASA's Instrument For Detecting Life On Mars

Roland Piquepaille writes "With the financial help of NASA, American and European researchers have developed a new sensor to check for life on Mars. It should also be able to determine if traces of life's molecular building blocks have been produced by anything that was once alive. The device has been tested in the Atacama Desert in Chile. It should be part of the science payload for the ExoMars rover planned for launch in 2013."

Comments

Re:udk

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Yes, but you have to bet. And TFA refers mostly to aminoacids, and IMHO it is a good bet. Non-biogenic aminoacids are known to form in meteorites and are among the most common organic molecules that build up in prebiotic conditions. Aminoacid chirality is a strong indicator of life: having to deal with both chiral forms of a molecule would require to have a set of enzymes for each enantiomer (A non-specific enzyme wouldn't probably work, in particular for building a polymer like proteins or DNA: ordered structures like proteins are much easier to build by using only one enantiomer of a chiral building block.). From an evolutive point of view, choice of chirality just makes sense.

Of course it is possible that anything weird happens over there, but we have to bet and check for what we look plausible first.