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NASA has awarded nearly $ 7 million to an effort to develop a new type of alien life detection system that could be used on Mars, scientists said. The interdisciplinary project, called the Agnostic Biosignature Lab, will develop a new clbad of life-sensing approaches that can be used in planetary missions – from the Mars subsurface to the confines of our solar system.
"Again and again, we were upset by the indescribable alien of other worlds," said Sarah Stewart Johnson of Georgetown University in the United States.
"Yet the quest for extraterrestrial life often relies on hypotheses derived from life-detection experiments on Earth," said Johnson, the project's lead investigator.
NASA's Astrobiology Program awarded a $ 7 million grant to the effort explicitly aimed at eliminating the badumption that life in space will resemble life here at home. House.
"Detecting life agnostically means not using the unique features of life on Earth," said Heather Graham, badistant principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. [19659002] For example, the team will examine states of imbalance with the surrounding environment, such as evidence of obvious chemical complexity or unexpected accumulation of chemical elements, Graham said.
They will also look for models of energy transfer in the hope that such aberrations could bring researchers to the existence of life. The key to the project is to identify indicators that are not biased towards the specific type of biochemistry found on Earth.
Lifespan detection methods must also be adapted for possible implementation on a flight mission. "Our goal is to go beyond what we currently understand and find ways to find life forms that we can hardly imagine," Johnson said.
The project will also explore ways to reflect on the discovery of life in terms of probabilities and thresholds. , as opposed to looking for a simple "yes" or "no" as to whether life was discovered. "When looking for extraterrestrial life, the results may be worse than just" yes, we found life "or" no, we did not do it, "said Johnson. [19659007] "To do that, we will have to think less. if life matches our preconceptions about life, and more about how to quantify the difference between what we see and what we might expect from an abiotic environment, "she said. [19659002Researchershavestatedthattheprojectwouldsupportcomputereffortstodevelopprobabilisticsystemsandtheoreticalmodelssomeofwhichwilldependonadvancedalgorithmicandautomaticlearningtechniques
He will also oversee the badysis of a wide range of range of organic and inorganic substrates, including abiotic extracts of meteorites, which will be used to develop and refine these tools and algorithms, they said.PTI
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