NASA has a life-detecting instrument ready to fly to Europa or Enceladus

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A new device containing eight instruments designed to search for life in water could fly on a future mission to Enceladus or Europa.

, but neither it nor any other mission to the outer solar system to date has been equipped with instruments that can find life. Any future mission carrying OWLS would be different. from Jupiter and Saturn, bandwidth for transmitting data back is low. Therefore, OWLS must collect huge tranches of data, autonomously analyze it to hopefully discover life by itself, and then send just the relevant results back to Earth.

"We're starting to ask questions now that necessitate more sophisticated instruments," Lukas Mandrake, who is the OWLS' instrument autonomy system engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a.

OWLS isn't just one smart instrument, but a suite of eight experiments capable of investigating whether life exists in the samples that it collects. Tests conducted with OWLS in California's extremely salty Mono Lake, which scientists think may not be too dissimilar to the salty waters of Europa and Enceladus' oceans, successfully"discovered" life in the Californian lake. Now, with a bit of downsizing, OWLS is ready to take on the icy moons, its developers say.

"We have demonstrated the first generation of the OWLS suite," Peter Willis, who is OWLS' co-principal investigator and science lead from JPL, said in the statement."The next step is to customize and miniaturize it for specific mission scenarios."Among the eight instruments within OWLS is the Extant Life Volumetric Imaging System , which is a group of various microscopes, developed in association with scientists at Portland State University in Oregon.

The DHM can work in conjunction with OWLS' Organic Capillary Electrophoresis Analysis System . Capillary electrophoresis is a technique for separating— such as the various amino acids, fatty acids and nucleic acids life relies on — in a liquid using electric fields. The molecules are then sent to a mass spectrometer, which measures the masses of particles in the sample, and a volume fluorescence imager, which uses dyes to bind these chemical building blocks together.

 

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Amazing!

All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there.

thanks for feeding the direct ticket off, concord dude

If life is common, it makes no sense that we are the first lifeform to reach this stage of evolution. Either life is exceedingly rare or there is a point in evolutionary development that all lifeforms destroy themselves. Have we reached it?

Took them long enough

Could they fly it over the DNC headquarters? What’s that? It doesn’t detect sentient life. That’s OK. We’re talking DNC headquarters. ;-)

King Ramses has a private satellite ready to turn off the electric system 😂

Time to sing Data'a 'Life Form' song.

even if there is life we will destroy it anyway

They need to quit being cheap and send a manned mission.

But we still can’t launch Artemis.

I hope within the next 10yrs human settlement should start on the moon

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