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[http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-life-04c.html]Read me
*This is a rather long article dealing with items such as proteins, amino acids, microfluids, etc. Abit on the "techy" side.
"'If you can't detect life in the Yungay region of the Atacama Desert, you have no business going to Mars,' Mathies said, referring to the desert region in Chile where the crew stayed and conducted some of their tests."
They're planning on this technology going "aboard NASA's roving, robotic Mars Science Laboratory mission and/or the European Space Agency's ExoMars mission, both scheduled for launch in 2009."
Hopefully this hasn't been posted previously.
--Cindy
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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I've mentioned that organic analyzer a couple of times but never posted a link to it so that's still a welcome addition. :;):
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Provided the device itself and the rover can be sterilized and cleaned well enough, and there are no broken tubes, bad chemicals, or other damage this would be essentially unquestionable evidence of life. You can make amino acids with random arcitecture with purely chemical reactions, but there is no possible way that environmental chemistry can make ones with uniform, regular, and repeating shape... only living things can.
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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Broken tubes aren't going to be a problem, the whole thing is going to be one of those MEMS lab-on-a-chip deals. Basically, analyte is pulled into a capillary and electrophoresed. The different animo acids are labelled with a fluorescent probe (probably the CBD stain from Molecular Probes) and the difference in speed of their movement through the capillary will distinguish the various amino acids. The chirality is determined by lining the capillary with a chiral compund that slectively retards one handedness over the other.
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