While NASA's rovers have looked for signs of life outside of our world, they haven't searched for life directly.
By Mallory Locklear, Engadget
[post_ads]While NASA's rovers have looked for signs of life
outside of our world, they haven't searched for life directly. But
Melissa Floyd, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, is
working on a device that might change that. She wants to build an
instrument that could look through soil and rock samples for evidence of
bacteria
or another type of single-celled microorganism called archaea. These
organisms are thought to have been the first to appear on Earth and
Floyd began to wonder if maybe life on nearby planets evolved like it
did on our own. "I had this idea, actually a major assumption on my
part: what if life evolved on Mars the same way it did here on Earth?
Certainly, Mars was bombarded with the same soup of chemistry as Earth,"
Floyd said in a statement.
But
looking directly for life on another planet isn't easy. And the major
challenge here is to develop a machine and a protocol that can
effectively replicate what scientists do here on Earth. Floyd believes
that a technique called fluorescent in situ hybridization is the best
option for this project, and she's working on automating that process.
When
a scientist uses this particular technique, they have to put a sample
of something on a slide, treat the cells of that sample to make them
permeable, add a molecular probe that will attach to certain sequences
of DNA or RNA in the cell, heat the sample and then look at it under a
microscope. And those are just the main steps -- there are a number of
others in this process. "I'm trying to determine whether I can do the
same thing with a robot," said Floyd.
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If such a robot can be engineered, NASA
could then send it on its own or as part of a rover to another planet
or moon in our solar system. It may seem like a tall order, but it could
give scientists another powerful tool with which to search for
extraterrestrial life. Floyd notes that her assumption about how life
formed elsewhere in our solar system could be wrong. "But how do we
know," she asked. "We've never looked."
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