ExoLance: Shooting Darts At Mars To Find Life

astroengine (1577233) writes To find life on Mars, some scientists believe you might want to look underground for microbes that may be hiding from the harsh radiation that bathes the red planet's surface. Various NASA rovers have scraped away a few inches at a time, but the real paydirt may lie a meter or two below the surface. That's too deep for existing instruments, so a team of space enthusiasts has launched a more ambitious idea: dropping arrow-like probes from the Martian atmosphere to pierce the soil like bunker-busting bug catchers. The "ExoLance" project aims to drop ground-penetrating devices, each of which would carry a small chemical sampling test to find signs of life. "One of the benefits of doing this mission is that there is less engineering," said Chris Carberry, executive director of Explore Mars, a non-profit space advocacy group pushing the idea. "With penetrators we can engineer them to get what we want, and send it back to an orbiter. We can theoretically check out more than one site at a time. We could drop five or six, which increases the chances of finding something." They will be performing a test run in the Mojave desert to see if their design stands any chance of working.

Comments

ExoComp, er, Lance!

[just_another_sean]

Well as long as they don't spontaneously exhibit signs of evolving into living organisms I don't see what else could go wrong.

Well.. revived an idea

[rijrunner]

Just for clarification, the Russians and the US have launched penetrator missions before for Mars. They were unsuccessful. (The russians failed to achieve orbit insertion, IIRC and the US ones failed on impact).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_2

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=MARS96D

Re:Well.. revived an idea

[NoKaOi]

The ExoLance folks don't seem to claim that the idea of going below the surface is novel, only the "news" article does that. It is apparent, however, that their ideas for the design are different from DS2:
http://exploremars.org/exolanc...

Additionally, their video mentions DS2, they themselves don't say that the idea of subsurface is novel, but that their implementation is.

Implementation details

[marcello_dl]

For you slashdotters, the two return codes of the experiment:
0: "There is no life here".
1: "There used to be life here, too bad I crashed into it".

Re:Mars Attacks!

[CanHasDIY]

And if they interpret this as an attack?

Then we swap the probes for tungsten rods and "defend ourselves."

But it's just a misunderstanding!

[pr0t0]

In the decades past, it was viewed as harmless...even cute when the little golf-cart like robots crawled across the surface doing their little experiments. But then in 2025, Earth attacked. It was without warning or provocation that the vicious spikes penetrated the community, and this action would not go without swift and formidable retribution. So the ships were fueled and armed, and a vast armada launched into the sky and made their way to seek...not revenge, but justice. The Earthlings, with their antiquated detection systems, didn't even notice the approaching fleet with weapons ready to unleash hell.

But alas, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was swallowed by a small dog, and no justice was served that day or any other.

Apologies to Douglas Adams.