Life-Probing Instrument Preparing for Mission to Mars (Forwarded)

University of California-San Diego

Media Contact:
Annie Reisewitz or Robert Monroe, 858-534-3624

April 28, 2008

Life-Probing Instrument Preparing for Mission to Mars

Scripps researcher receives $2 million in funding for Urey instrument's
flight planning and design

By Annie Reisewitz, Scripps Institution of Oceanography/UC San Diego

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 $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 analyze 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 finalize 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.

[NOTE: Images supporting this release are available at
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/04-08MissionToMars.asp ]


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