STORY CONTACT: Ron Crawford, (208) 885-6580, [email protected]
Touraj Assefi, (208) 885-6045, [email protected]
MEDIA CONTACT: Bill Loftus, (208) 885-7694, [email protected]
UI TEAM WINS GRANT TO HELP NASA DETECT LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS
A team of University of Idaho scientists will develop a device to help search for life beyond Earth. The key to the detection system will be measuring the processes that organisms use to obtain energy.
The team is one of eight winners nationally picked to refine their ideas for finding extraterrestrial life through a "Grand Challenge." NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory sponsored the competition.
The UI team received $250,000 and has 18 months to prove that its concept is worth further work. If it leaps that hurdle, the team could receive a much larger award to pursue its ideas.
Ron Crawford, a microbiologist and UI Environmental Biotechnology Institute director, and Touraj Assefi, an electrical engineer and UI Microelectronics Research and Communications Institute director, will lead the project as a partnership. Before joining UI, Assefi had worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for eight years as a division representative on the Galileo Mission to Jupiter.
The UI team also includes Chemistry Department Chairman Chien Wai, chemist Frank Cheng, mechanical engineer Tony Anderson and electrical engineer Rick Wells.
The prototype device the team plans to design will test for life by trying to detect heat and energy-harvesting molecules produced by life processes.
The device should work, Crawford said, even if life processes are completely alien to Earth, perhaps even based on an entirely different chemistry.
"One of the reasons we were funded, I believe," Crawford said, "is that our idea is based on a non-Earthcentric approach." The team's idea has the potential to detect all life, no matter how alien. "Conceptually, our device could go anywhere in the universe where there might be life and detect it."
Practically, our solar system is about as far as NASA is likely to look for now, Crawford said. The schedule for a search elsewhere would be measured in lifetimes because of the distances involved. Two of the most likely targets would be Europa, the icebound moon of Jupiter, or Mars.
NASA's original Viking Mission to Mars looked for life and found what looked like chemical processes that signaled its presence. Further research, however, showed soils on the red planet contained oxidizing compounds, not organisms, which broke down test chemicals.
Once the challenge of detecting life is resolved, the team must also suggest how the process can be miniaturized so the laboratory to do the work can be put on a chip.
"The thing I am really excited about is that two institutes with very different backgrounds are cooperating and are producing the chip," Assefi said.
"This is really an initiative that is university wide, involving chemistry, biology and electronics to confront some of the challenges we face," Crawford said.
Spin-offs might include medical monitoring devices that can be implanted into the body to cure medical problems, much as the pacemakers that have improved the lives of thousands of patients. Or the research might lead to remote devices to monitor environmental processes on Earth.
"There's a great interest in these sorts of things, so our team has expertise that is held in high value," Crawford said.
"Right now we have to show proof of concept, and I think we are well on our way to success," Assefi added.
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