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| NASA Developing 'Chemical Laptop |
| NASA Developing 'Chemical Laptop' to Search for Life Outside Earth
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| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
, 18-November-2015
11:23:21 AM |
| In a bid to find concrete evidence of life outside Earth, NASA is developing a 'chemical laptop', which will be the first portable, miniaturised laboratory built to detect both amino acids and fatty acids on other worlds.
The device being developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California analyses samples for materials associated with life.
"If this instrument were to be sent to space, it would be the most sensitive device of its kind to leave Earth, and the first to be able to look for both amino acids and fatty acids," said Jessica Creamer, a NASA postdoctoral fellow based at JPL.
Like a tricorder from "Star Trek," the Chemical Laptop is a miniaturised on-the-go laboratory, which researchers hope to send one day to another planetary body such as Mars or Europa.
It is roughly the size of a regular computing laptop, but much thicker to make room for chemical analysis components inside. But unlike a tricorder, it has to ingest a sample to analyse it, NASA said.
"Our device is a chemical analyser that can be reprogrammed like a laptop to perform different functions," said Fernanda Mora, a JPL technologist who is developing the instrument with JPL's Peter Willis, the project's principal investigator.
"As on a regular laptop, we have different apps for different analyses like amino acids and fatty acids," said the technologist.
Amino acids are building blocks of proteins, while fatty acids are key components of cell membranes. Both are essential to life, but can also be found in non-life sources.
Amino acids come in two types, Left-handed and right-handed. Like the left and right hands of a person, these amino acids are mirror images of each other but contain the same components.
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