{"id":177869,"date":"2023-12-08T18:26:33","date_gmt":"2023-12-09T00:26:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/evaluating-sampling-methods-for-finding-life-beyond-earth"},"modified":"2023-12-08T18:26:33","modified_gmt":"2023-12-09T00:26:33","slug":"evaluating-sampling-methods-for-finding-life-beyond-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/evaluating-sampling-methods-for-finding-life-beyond-earth","title":{"rendered":"Evaluating Sampling Methods for Finding Life Beyond Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Can amino acids, the key building blocks of life, survive high-speed impacts from a spacecraft orbiting another world? This is what a recent study<\/a> published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)<\/em> hopes to find out as a team of researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) conducted laboratory experiments<\/a> to see if biosignature molecules identified in the plumes of Saturn\u2019s icy moon, Enceladus<\/a>, by NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft could survive hypervelocity impacts experienced by Cassini passing through the plumes. This study is a first-of-its-kind to investigate how extraterrestrial plumes can be analyzed and holds the potential to help researchers develop more efficient techniques for finding extraterrestrial life beyond Earth.<\/p>\n

For the study, the researchers used the custom-built Hypervelocity Ice Grain Impact Mass Spectrometer to investigate if ice grains being shot out of Enceladus\u2019s plumes at 800 mph (400m\/s) could have survived after striking Cassinis\u2019 detectors, which were estimated between<\/a> 4 to 10.9 mi\/s (6.5 to 17.5 km\/s). For the tests, the team shot water through a needle at a high voltage, which caused it to break down into droplets followed by them entering a vacuum where they freeze, and the team used the spectrometer to measure the results of the grains impacting a microchannel plate detector. The results demonstrated that amino acids within ice grains could survive up to impacts of 2.6 miles per second (4.2 km\/s), which the team says could serve as a baseline for sampling such plumes.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo get an idea of what kind of life may be possible in the solar system, you want to know there hasn\u2019t been a lot of molecular fragmentation in the sampled ice grains, so you can get that fingerprint of whatever it is that makes it a self-contained life form,\u201d said Dr. Robert Continetti<\/a>, who is a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCSD and a co-author on the study. \u201cOur work shows that this is possible with the ice plumes of Enceladus.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Can amino acids, the key building blocks of life, survive high-speed impacts from a spacecraft orbiting another world? This is what a recent study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) hopes to find out as a team of researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) conducted laboratory experiments [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":706,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,1694],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-electronics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/706"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177869\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}