This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of employ.

chemical laptop

As NASA plans a new generation of robotic missions to explore the solar system, scientists are trying to figure out how to detect possible alien life. One of the most promising approaches is a and so-chosen "chemic laptop" being developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). This cocky-contained instrument has roughly the same footprint as a conventional laptop, but inside is everything you need to detect life on some other planet.

NASA likens the chemic laptop to a Star Trek tricorder in that information technology'south a "miniaturized on-the-get laboratory." One vital difference, though, is that the laptop needs to physically collaborate with a sample of water or water ice. The team was conscious of how tough information technology might be to get a pure sample of water or water ice on a planet like Mars (although information technology does accept water), so the chemical laptop operates a bit like an espresso motorcar.

When the sample is collected by whatsoever rover or robot NASA sends out at that place, it'south placed in a glass tube and boiled. The water comes out along with the organic molecules for analysis by the instrument. It has to be much thicker than a regular laptop to conform all the tools. The extracted h2o is fed into the musical instrument and mixed with a fluorescent dye. Inside the laptop is a microchip capable of separating out amino acids and fatty acids — this is what the chemical laptop is looking for. The molecules so pass through a laser that counts them up.

chemical laptop

And then, why go searching for these specific molecules? The chemical laptop is looking for a fix of compounds essential to life as we know it. Prison cell membranes are composed of fat acids (lipids), and proteins are made upwardly of amino acids. If you find both together in substantial quantities, it could indicate to life.

The chemic laptop is going deeper than just detecting the presence of amino acids. It's looking for the mixture of left-handed and right-handed amino acids. Left and right-handed molecules have the aforementioned structure, but are mirror images of each other (called chirality). Life on Earth evolved to employ only left-handed amino acids, only mayhap life elsewhere is based on correct-handed ones. Scientists speculate that a fifty-50 mixture of left and right amino acids would most likely not be of biological origin, but if the sample is composed of mostly one or the other, that could indicate living organisms aggregated those molecules in their proteins.

So far, JPL has tested the laptops in the Mars Yard information technology has on site, but an upcoming test in the Atacama Desert of Republic of chile will put it through more rigorous testing in a Mars-like environment. Mars is the most likely first target for the chemic laptop, only it could also make the trip to destinations like Enceladus and Europa someday to melt some snowfall.