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Life on Mars? Before We Go, We've Got To Know
By Greg Clark
Staff Writer
posted: 08:30 am ET
09 December 1999
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MOD: The Mars Organic Detector MOD: The Mars Organic Detector The Mars Organic Detector is designed to test martian soil samples for compounds associated with organic life. The detector, which would take up the volume of about a dozen CD cases stacked together, is provisionally budgeted for $3 million. It is designed to heat a rock sample to vaporize any organic compounds that might be inside. The vaporized molecules that vent out of the sample pass a cold finger -- a small probe chilled to the ambient nighttime temperature on Mars -- condensing onto its surface. Special sensors that detect amino acids and other organic molecules can measure as few as two cells per gram of sample material, said Jefferey Bada, principal investigator selected for the organic detector. Bada, a professor of marine chemistry at Scripps Institute of Oceanography and director of NASA's Specialized Center of Research and Training in Exobiology, has already built a working prototype of the device. "This was likely what made his proposal so attractive to NASA," Bada speculated. "It's an instrument that's very mature in design." While life on Mars is of interest to almost everybody, the HEDS program is concerned because of the implications that life on Mars would have for potential human missions to the planet, Bada said. "That issue has to be settled pretty much before we send any human explorers there. There is always the fear, although I think it's a very remote fear, that there could be some sort of lethal bug lurking in the martian surface and either we bring it back here and it infects the Earth, or it infects astronauts when they go there," he said. If the detector does find organic compounds it won't be definitive evidence for life on Mars, Bada said, but it could almost rule out the possibility. "If we can't detect organic compounds at the levels we're talking about, the possibility that there was or is life on Mars is very remote I think." Return to main story.
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