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NASA has awarded nearly US $ 7 million to an effort to develop a new type of extraterrestrial life detection system that could be used on Mars, scientists said. The interdisciplinary project, called the Agnostic Biosignature Lab, will develop a new class of life-sensing approaches that can be used in planetary missions – from the Mars subsurface to the most remote regions of our solar system.
"Time and time again, we have been shaken by the indescribable strangeness of other worlds," said Sarah Stewart Johnson of Georgetown University in the United States.
"Still, the quest for an extraterrestrial life is often based on assumptions derived from life-detection experiments on Earth," said Johnson, the project's lead investigator.
NASA's Astrobiology program has awarded a US $ 7 million grant to this effort to explicitly reject the assumption that life in space would be like home.
"Detecting life agnostically means not using the unique characteristics of life on Earth," said Heather Graham, assistant principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
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 lead researchers into 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.
Lifecycle detection methods should also be adapted for possible implementation on flight missions. "Our goal is to go beyond what we currently understand and find ways to find life forms that we can barely imagine," Johnson said.
The project will also explore ways to think about the discovery of life in terms of probabilities and thresholds, as opposed to looking for a simple "yes" or "no" about whether life was discovered. "When looking for an extraterrestrial life, the results can be more disastrous than just" yes, we found life "or" no, we did not do it, "said Johnson.
"To do this, we will have to think less about whether life fits our preconceptions about life, and more about quantifying the difference between what we see and what we might expect from an abiotic environment," he said. she said.
The researchers said the project would support computational efforts to develop probabilistic and theoretical models, some of which will depend on advanced algorithmic and machine learning techniques.
He will also oversee the analysis of a wide range of organic and inorganic substrates, including abiotic meteorite extracts, which will be used to develop and refine these tools and algorithms, they said.
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