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NASA has awarded nearly USD seven million to an effort to develop a new kind of extraterrestrial life detection system that could be used on Mars, scientists say. The interdisciplinary project, called the Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures, will develop a new class of life-sensing approaches for use on planetary missions – from the subsurface of the Mars to the farthest reaches of our solar system.
"Time and again," said Sarah Stewart Johnson of Georgetown University in the US. "Yet the search for extraterrestrial life often defies to assumptions that arise from experiences with life detection on Earth," said Johnson, the project's principal investigator.
NASA's Astrobiology Program awarded the USD seven million grant to the effort of seeking the thrust out of life at home. "Detecting life in an earth life," said deputy principal investigator Heather Graham of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
For example, the team will consider states of disequilibrium with the surrounding environment, such as evidence of conspicuous chemical complexity or unexpected accumulations of chemical elements, Graham said. They would also look for patterns of energy transfer in the hope that such aberrations could tip off the researchers to the existence of life. The key for the project is to identify indicators that are biased towards the specific type of biochemistry found on Earth.
The life detection methods must also be suitable for eventual implementation on flight missions. "Our goal is to go beyond what we are currently understanding and ways of living we can scarcely imagine," Johnson said.
The project will also explore ways of thinking about the discovery of life in the face of problems and thresholds, as opposed to seeking a simple "yes" or "no". "When you are looking for extraterrestrial life, you may find it just 'yes we found life' or 'no we did not,'" Johnson said.
"To do that, we would need to think about what life is, and what we are about to quantify the difference between what we see and what we expect from an abiotic environment," she said.
Researchers said the project will support computational efforts to develop probabilistic and theoretical models, some of which will depend on advanced algorithmic and machine learning techniques. It will also oversee the analysis of a wide array of organic and inorganic substrates, including abiotic extracts from meteorites, which will be used to develop and refine these tools and algorithms, they said.
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