Many scientists think that the frozen moons of the Solar System, such as Jupiter's moon Europa, could be good places to find past or present life.
Looking for a slice of life
2 Jul 2009
Ice is a common feature of many of the bodies in the Solar System that have the potential to support life.
Working out how to detect signs of life—past or present—in ice will be a key part of planetary exploration.
Project SLIce—Signatures of Life in Ice—is designed to find out both what signs of life might survive in ice, and how to detect it in a scientifically robust way.
At the Goldschmidt2009 meeting in Davos, Switzerland last week, scientists, showed that not only living micro-organisms, but also traces of long-dead ones, and the food that sustained them, can be detected in shallow ice layers, using methods rigorously tested in one of our own planet's most extreme environments.
"With SLIce, we wanted to figure out the nature of the organic matter in ice and how what we find on Earth can be the basis for comparisons with organic matter on Mars," explains Liane Benning of the University of Leeds, UK.
"The organic matter we find could be alive or dead, representing extant or extinct life, or even the nutrients that made life possible, and we want to identify the biological signals that point towards ice-dwelling life."
< Researchers working on Svalbard island.
The SLIce team went to a glacial region of the Arctic island Svalbard to try taking ice samples in exactly the way it would be done on Mars, using procedures and tests developed as part of AMASE, a long-running international project that has established Svalbard as a test-bed for planetary exploration.
"We're using sample devices, primarily to be operated from a rover, but we're also testing how we go about taking and testing samples and keeping them separate," says Benning.
There could be microbes living in the ice, but there could also be the dead bodies of microbes that used to live there, and there could be biological molecules that blew in from dust and micrometeorites.
"We need to identify what we've got, so that we know what it's telling us," says Benning.
One of the things that the Svalbard researchers found was that the highest concentrations of living microbes were in ice layers close to the surface, where a rover would be able to test more easily than at several metres depth, for example.
The protocols that SLIce has developed include issues such as cleaning the scoop that a rover would use, both before and after sampling, and between samples. This matters for the data—but also, potentially, for planetary security.
< Scientists want to make sure that robotic spacecraft don't carry Earth bugs to Mars.
"We want to be sure that the bugs we are measuring are martian bugs and not something we brought with us on the spacecraft," says Benning.
"We now have ways of making tools not only sterile, but also organic-free to null levels. This is partly to make sure we don't spend all this time measuring material we brought from Earth, but also as a form of forward planetary protection, including protection for Earth in the case of sample return missions.
"We went to Svalbard because it is a very good analogue for conditions on Mars," says Benning. "The geology is the same as on Mars—it's the only place on Earth with rocks like the Martian meteorite ALH0084, which showed possible fossil micro-organisms."
Adapted from information issued by the Goldschmidt Conference / NASA / AMASE / Kirsten Fristad.
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