NASA funds instrument to probe life on Mars

A joint UC San Diego/UC Berkeley experiment to detect life on Mars that is scheduled to fly aboard the European ExoMars rover mission in 2013 will receive $750,000 in development funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), according to a NASA announcement this week.

The instrument is designed to provide the most rigorous analysis possible for the past and present existence of biological compounds on Mars' surface, according to Jeffrey Bada, a professor at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and lead investigator on the project team. Other principal scientists are Richard Mathies, professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley, and Frank Grunthaner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, as well as researchers at NASA's Ames Research Center in Menlo Park and the Leiden Institute of Chemistry in the Netherlands.

NASA is collaborating with the European Space Agency on the ExoMars mission, which will focus on exobiology and the science of life in space and on other planets. ExoMars will include a highly mobile rover with a drill capable of extracting soil samples two meters below the Mars surface.

[More: physlink]