'Life Detection' Kit Launched into Space

A new experiment based on technology similar to that used in pregnancy test kits, but specifically designed to search for signs of life on Mars, was successfully launched into space and is now orbiting the Earth.

The European Space Agency's experiment, called the "Life Marker Chip," recently hitched a ride into space aboard a Russian rocket, which launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. Strapped to the ESA's Foton-M3 capsule, the tiny postage stamp sized experiment carried more than 2,000 life-detecting samples that glow if they encounter life-critical compounds, such as proteins or DNA.

Scientists and engineers are hoping that the life-sensing chip will remain viable in the harsh radiation, temperatures and vacuum of space during a journey to Mars. The kit is designed to detect trace levels of biomarkers, which should be able to reveal if life currently is, or ever was, present on Mars.

"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.

The experiment works similarly to a pregnancy test that uses color-changing chemicals to pick up traces of hormones found in greater numbers after conception. Scientists will examine the LMC's samples once the Foton-M3 mission returns to Earth on Sept. 25 near the Russia-Kazakhstan border to see if they remained viable after their time in space.

The experiment's team hopes to ultimately strap their fully tested device aboard the ESA's "ExoMars" robotic rover mission, planned for launch in 2013, where it would serve as a tiny "lab-on-a-chip" to detect if has ever been pregnant with living organisms, (assuming NASA's Phoenix Lander doesn't beat them to it).

Mark Sims, an LMC mission manager at University of Leicester in the U.K. said, "this mission will be an important stepping stone in our ultimate goal of putting a LMC experiment on the surface of and using it to search for evidence of life."

Posted by Rebecca Sato

Exploration: Secrets of the Soil
Is There Life on Mars? NASA Goes Underground to Find Out
New Phoenix Mission Technology to Search for Life
Is there an Interplanetary Mars-Earth Microbe Shuttle?
"The Overview Effect": Is Space Travel Next Step in Human Evolution?
Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos Revisited -NASA's Phoenix Probe & the Search for

Comments

Great post! I am rather skeptical if they will find anything on Mars (even evidence of life in the past on that dusty world).

Of course I wouldn't mind be proven wrong, but Mars is pretty much a dead world, and (I assume) life will only appear on the red planet when humans settle it in the future.

Posted by: Darnell Clayton | September 23, 2007 at 01:06 PM