The Urey:
Mars Organic Oxidant Detector has been designed by NASA-funded researchers to
look for life on Mars.
This "life detector"
will check for life's essential molecules at incredibly small concentrations.
Urey will also distinguish between amino acids made by biological and
non-biological processes [image].
The device is named after
Harold Urey, who received the 1934 Nobel Prize in chemistry; Dr. Urey is also
known for a 1953 experiment
with Stanley Miller in which it was shown that a lightning-like discharge in a
test tube full of methane, hydrogen, ammonia and water could produce amino
acids.
Every form of life on Earth
has proteins assembled from chains of amino acids. However, amino acids can be
made both by living organisms and by non-biological processes. The presence of
amino acids alone do not prove the existence of life.
It turns out that
non-biological processes create a 50/50 mix of left- and right-handed versions
of the molecules. Living things on Earth, however, make and use left-handed
amino acids almost exclusively. Clever Urey the life detector will be looking
for the ratio between left- and right-handed molecules.
A Urey component called the
micro-capillary electrophoresis unit has the critical job of separating
different types of organic compounds from one another for identification, including
separation of mirror-image amino acids from each other. "We have
essentially put a laboratory onto a single wafer," said Dr. Richard
Mathies of the University of California, Berkeley, a Urey co-investigator.
The European Space Agency
has chosen Urey to be part of the payload for the ExoMars
rover planned for launch in 2013 [image]. The rover will grind Martian soil to a fine
powder and then deliver it to a suite of instruments, including Urey.
The Urey sensor will remind
many people of the long range "sensor scans" on science fiction
programs like Star Trek. However, author Frank
Herbert thought about the idea a decade earlier in his short story Cease
Fire:
The
antennae of the Life Detector atop the OP swept back and forth in a rhythmic
halfcircle like so many frozen sticks brittle with rime ice...
(Read more about the Frank Herbert's fictional life detector)
You might also be
interested in this earlier article on life detecting sensors: Zoe
Robot To Find Life On Distant Worlds. See also these related stories:
Read more about Urey at NASA.
(This Science Fiction in
the News story used with permission from Technovelgy.com - where science meets
fiction.)
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