Author: Ava Hejazi

After years of being pushed by the U.S. Congress to follow the Europa Clipper, a spacecraft that will survey Jupiter’s frozen moon, with a lander, NASA has begun to push back. The agency disclosed today that the lander mission, if it happens, will now come no earlier than 2030, 5 years later than Congress mandated. And the agency will be challenged to meet the 2023 launch date set for the Clipper.

Thanks to the watery ocean beneath its icy crust, Europa has loomed for several decades as a prime target in the search for life outside Earth. But unlike the $3 billion Europa Clipper, a flagship NASA mission under development that will conduct periodic flybys of the moon, the Europa lander has not been rated as a high-priority mission by planetary scientists.

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We have received an ICEE2 Award from NASA, starting April 1, 2019, to develop application of our core microfluidic analyzer for the analysis of samples from the Europa surface, called the Microfluidic Organic Analyzer for Biosignatures (MOAB).

MOAB is a rapidly maturing miniaturized microfluidic organic chemical and biochemical analyzer that will sensitively analyze Europa surface ice samples for amine, amino acid, and carboxylic acid biomarkers that may be indicative of past or present life. MOAB addresses SMD Science Goals to “explore and find locations where life could have existed or could exist today”.

MOAB directly responds to the Europa Lander Study 2016 Report (SDT Report) [1]  and the 2018 Addendum [2] restated level 1 Goal  – to search for biosignatures that provide evidence of past or present life on Europa. MOAB will achieve these goals by determining the abundances and patterns of organic biomarker compounds including amines, amino acids and carboxylic acids with a sensitivity of 1 picomole per gram (Objective 1A; Investigation 1A1).  MOAB will also determine the types, abundances and enantiomeric ratios of any amino acids in the sample (Objective 1A; Investigation 1A2).

The miniaturized MOAB instrument has size, mass (3400 cc, 2.8 kg) and power requirements that can be accommodated in a variety of ways in the Europa Lander.

The Mathies Lab and Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley are seeking a full-time postdoctoral scholar to aid in the development of life-detection technology for astrobiological research! View the file below for the full description and application details.

Government agencies may not have a monopoly on life-hunting space missions for much longer.

Breakthrough Initiatives, which already scans the heavens for possible signals from faraway alien civilizations, is considering looking for E.T. on worlds close to home, founder Yuri Milner said.

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Better access to chemistry from space keeps changing how we understand life.

How did life start? There may not be a bigger question. To learn the secret of our origins means going back beyond the earliest forms of biological life, past simple bacteria, and down to the chemistry of the building blocks that came earlier.

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SEATTLE — A privately funded team may beat NASA to the punch when it comes to looking for life on the Saturn moon Enceladus.

Breakthrough Initiatives — a program founded by billionaire tech investor Yuri Milner to hunt for alien life and help explore the cosmos — is considering launching a mission that would fly through the plume of water vapor and other material emanating from Enceladus’ south polar region, Milner said here yesterday (Nov. 9) at The Economist magazine’s inaugural global space summit, called “A New Space Age.”

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A private team may send a spacecraft to Saturn’s watery moon before a space agency like NASA makes it happen.

The two most exciting places in the solar system may be Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The watery worlds are widely considered the best bets to find extraterrestrial life. NASA is now building a spacecraft called Europa Clipper to launch to Jupiter’s moon in the early 2020s. Enceladus, however, does not yet have its own mission on the books.

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Did life evolve somewhere else? Of course,” says Richard Mathies, chemistry professor at UC Berkeley. Mathies is developing the technology to explore extraterrestrial life in our solar system and beyond. “What does it look like? I’m not sure.”

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The discovery means life on the small moon is a real possibility.

When NASA researchers first realized in 2005 that Saturn’s moon Enceladus has liquid water under its surface, they were stunned. “Tremendously exciting,” Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker told Popular Mechanics.

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Welcome to the EOA (Enceladus Organic Analyzer). We’ll be posting updates about this project here.