Chemical Guidebook May Help Mars Rover Track Extraterrestrial Life.

(From AScribe)

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho -- To help a NASA rover eventually hunt for life on Mars, scientists are writing a chemical guidebook to aid the search for extraterrestrial life. Using new imaging tools and earthly parallels of ancient Mars environments, they're recording the types of subtle chemical changes that Martian microbes may have left on the planet's rocks. The researchers hope someday to arm a Mars rover with a suite of tools -- a guidebook, precise chemical imagers, and human-like reasoning ability -- and let it search for signs of alien life on its own.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory, University of Idaho, and University of Montana are developing the chemical guidebook as part of what they hope will be a definitive method to determine whether extraterrestrial rocks have ever harbored life. The group, supported by a $900,000 grant from the NASA Astrobiology Program, will be using chemical imaging technology that was previously developed at the INL and awarded a patent in November 2004.

The technology will be discussed during the 15th Annual Goldschmidt Conference, "A Voyage of Discovery," the premier annual meeting in geochemistry and mineralogy. The conference will be in Moscow, Idaho, May 20-25, and will mark the 50th anniversary of the Geochemical Society.

In 1996, a group of scientists reported they had found evidence of life on a Martian meteorite. But the claims are still controversial, said Daphne Stoner, project leader and chemistry research professor at the University of Idaho in Idaho Falls. The debates highlight the need for clear methods that will distinguish so-called "biosignatures" from look-alike signs of life.

"This project will help build a good gold standard for the unequivocal determination of life on extraterrestrial materials," Stoner said.

Stoner is collaborating with chemist Jill Scott at INL, geologist Nancy Hinman at University of Montana in Missoula, post-doctoral geochemist Beizhan Yan at the University of Idaho, and geology graduate student J. Michelle Kotler at the University of Montana. The team is using a specialized mass spectrometer to take chemical images of microbes and rocks under conditions close to what might be found on Mars, as well as developing a fuzzy logic computer program to decipher those spectral pictures. The researchers will take advantage of local exotic microbes to test the system's ability to identify signs of microbial life in minerals here on Earth.