Life-Probing
Instrument Preparing For Mission To Mars
(28 April 2008) Scripps researcher
receives US$ 2 million in funding for Urey instrument's flight planning and
design
A new life-detecting instrument is preparing for a
mission to the Red Planet. The Urey: Mars Organic and Oxidant Detector
instrument, developed by a scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at
UC San Diego, received approximately US$ 2 million in NASA funding to further
refine the design and technology for the European Space Agency's (ESA) 2013
ExoMars Rover Mission.
Named after the late Nobel Laureate and UC San
Diego scholar Harold C. Urey, the Urey instrument will perform the first search
for key classes of organic molecules in the Martian environment using
state-of-the-art analytical methods at part-per-million sensitivities. This
highly sensitive instrument is the first with the capability to effectively
discriminate between Martian materials produced by biological and
non-biological processes. In addition, the investigation will provide
definitive oxidation characteristics of those same samples.
Jeffrey Bada
of Scripps Oceanography, along with a multinational research team including
colleagues Frank Grunthaner of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Richard
Mathies of UC Berkeley, Aaron Zent of the NASA Ames Research Center, Richard
Quinn of the SETI Institute, Pascale Ehrenfreund of the NASA Goddard
Spaceflight Center and Mark Sephton of Imperial College, London have designed
an investigation using the Urey instrument to look for signs of past or present
life on Mars. It will analyse Martian rock and soil samples provided by the
ESA-developed ExoMars Rover, for organic molecules and amino acids, the
building blocks of life. Urey will be built and tested at the NASA Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.
"This next phase of
funding assures that the Urey instrument's design will be completed on schedule
and we will be prepared to start building the actual instrument next year,"
said Bada, professor of marine chemistry at Scripps and principal investigator
of the Urey investigation.
The instrument has been supported by NASA
Research and Development funding for the past several years leading up to this
transition to Phase A Flight planning and design.
The Urey instrument
has been identified as an integral component of ExoMars, a six-month mission on
the Red Planet and ESA's first rover mission to Mars. "We will be working very
closely with our European partners over the next year to finalise interfaces
and to further solidify how Urey fits into the overall ExoMars payload system,"
said Allen Farrington, project manager of the Urey development team at
JPL.
A compact instrument that can be held in the palm of one's hand,
Urey will search for trace levels of amine-containing organic molecules by
"making espresso" from spoon-sized amounts of Martian soil, freeze drying the
liquid to remove the water, and then slowly re-heating the residue, and
concentrating the organic molecules by condensing them on a cold trap. A
lab-on-a-chip, micro-fluidic, laser-induced fluorescence detector initially
developed by team members at UC Berkeley will probe the trap's
contents.
In addition to the organic compound analyses, Urey will also
test the Martian samples and environment for their ability to degrade organic
compounds through oxidation. The Mars Oxidant Instrument developed by team
members at NASA Ames Research Center, JPL and the SETI Institute will enable
the scientists to evaluate the stability of compounds directly under Martian
conditions. Even if no organic compounds are detected, this oxidation
information will provide important data for understanding the reasons why
organic compounds might not be preserved on Mars.
(source: Annie
Reisewitz, University of California, San Diego)
