{"id":29013,"date":"2023-01-19T11:38:06","date_gmt":"2023-01-19T11:38:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/?p=29013"},"modified":"2023-01-19T11:39:31","modified_gmt":"2023-01-19T11:39:31","slug":"alien-life-can-a-new-laser-detect-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/alien-life-can-a-new-laser-detect-it\/29013\/","title":{"rendered":"Alien life \u2013 can a new laser detect it?"},"content":{"rendered":"
As humanity forages increasingly deeper into the depths of space, more compact, resource-conserving, and accurate analytical tools will be critical for identifying potential alien life or habitable planets<\/a> and moons.<\/p>\n University of Maryland researchers have pioneered such technology, developing a new instrument for NASA space missions. The team’s mini laser-sourced analyser is significantly smaller and more resource efficient than previous iterations while performing the same quality performance to examine planetary material samples and potential biological activity.<\/p>\n The new instrument weighs only 17 pounds and is a scaled-down amalgamation of two essential tools for identifying alien life and the composition of materials – a pulsed ultraviolet laser that removes small amounts of material from a planetary sample and an OrbitrapTM<\/sup>\u00a0analyser that provides high-resolution data about a material’s chemistry.<\/p>\n Ricardo Arevalo, lead author of the paper and an associate professor of geology at the university, commented: “The Orbitrap was originally built for commercial use. You can find them in the labs of pharmaceutical, medical and proteomic industries.<\/p>\n “The one in my own lab is just under 400 pounds, so they’re quite large, and it took us eight years to make a prototype that could be used efficiently in space — significantly smaller and less resource-intensive, but still capable of cutting-edge science.”<\/p>\n The new technology shrinks the original Orbitrap and pairs it with laser desorption mass spectrometry (LDMS). \u00a0Itboasts the same capabilities as its predecessors but is more streamlined for space exploration. These techniques have currently not been employed in an extraterrestrial planetary environment.<\/p>\nHow does the new laser analyser work?<\/h3>\n