2012: If There's Life on Mars, We'll Find It

[Tuckerfan]

Assuming the probe doesn’t crash.

The University of California, Berkeley, scientists knew that if the Mars Organic Analyzer (MOA) they’d built could detect life in that crusty, arid land, then it would have a good chance some day of detecting life on the planet Mars.

In a place that hadn’t seen a blade of grass or a bug for ages, and contending with dust and temperature extremes that left her either freezing or sweating, Skelley ran 340 tests that proved the instrument could unambiguously detect amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. More importantly, she and Mathies were able to detect the preference of Earth’s amino acids for left-handedness over right-handedness. This “homochirality” is a hallmark of life that Mathies thinks is a critical test that must be done on Mars.