This NASA Scientist's Microscope Will Search For Life In Mars And Other Planets

It is likely that if we find life forms on an alien planet, they will not be breathing, walking creatures. Scientists, instead, expect to discover terrestrial life in the form of microbes or at least something at the same size. With this mind, it’s critical that the rovers we send to other planets can search for these life forms.

Considering that idea, a scientist at NASA wants to develop a technology that helps landers look at micro life forms just like how scientists do on Earth. At the Goddard Space Flight Center of NASA, based in Maryland, scientist Melissa Floyd has generated such technology.

Melissa Floyd

Until now, the rovers that NASA has designed its rovers to be capable of searching for bio-signatures, but not for life forms. And even though Floyd is still in the development phase of her technology, there’s a lot of hope to look for terrestrial life in the near future.

Floyd says that there’s life everywhere on our home planet, life exists even in places where humans cannot. She talked about her idea, starting with the question: what if Mars has life forms just similar to those on Earth? After all, Mars and Earth were bombarded with the same chemical combination.

The technology that Floyd is developing involves robotic instruments which are able to analyze soil sample to look for archaea and bacteria, they are microorganisms made of a single cell which are the first creatures to live on Earth.

On Earth, there are a million bacteria in a milliliter of water and 40 million in one gram of soil. Considering that, if lives on Mars has developed like on Earth, under the same conditions, we can discover bacteria in soil samples using a microscope.

FISH is the technology Floyd’s working on, which she envisions to be hardware on a rover or it can even be a robot. She said FISH will be able to discover even fragments of conserved sequences of genes if there’s any.

However, the challenge for Floyd here is automating the task. Because communicating to Mars rovers takes too long, scientists cannot directly control the robot from Earth. Successful automation means if the robot finds something, it will automatically sort and send its findings to NASA.