MIT's Martian Genome Project Will Search for Alien DNA on the Red Planet

By Clay Dillow Posted 11.05.2010 at 10:15 am 3 Comments

The Martian Surface It's inhospitable above, but signs of life could be lurking beneath the surface. NASA/JPL

When hypothesizing about life that may exist elsewhere in the universe, the tendency is to visualize something far different from life here on earth. But here in our galactic neighborhood, a team of MIT researchers argues, life it just as likely related to us. Following that line of thought, the team is developing a prototype alien DNA decoder that it hopes to send to Mars aboard a NASA-ESA mission slated for launch in 2018.

The premise of their reasoning is this: It’s estimated that Mars and Earth have swapped a billion tons of rock over the course of their lifetimes. And some of the stowaway microbes aboard those rocks could be quite hardy, surviving the trip. DNA is pretty durable as well. On the surface of Mars it wouldn’t last too long, but shielded from UV radiation DNA could lie dormant on Mars for a million years or so.

So MIT’s DNA decoder will be designed to dig. If there ever was life on Mars, or if there are organics buried there from other origins – be they Earth or elsewhere – the Search for Extraterrestrial Genomes (SETG) should be able to isolate, amplify, and identify nucleic acids right there on the Mars, no return trip necessary.

The technology is still a couple of years away from field tests in Chile’s Atacama Desert or in Antarctica, two of Earth’s analogs for the arid, cold deserts of Mars. If it passes muster there, it could be hunting the building blocks of life on the Red Planet by the dawn of the next decade.

[Discovery News]

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3 Comments

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HAZE

11/08/10 at 9:51 am

Interesting.

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Brian P.

11/08/10 at 4:33 pm

It's too bad they don't plan this stuff out a little better. A few years to develop and get it on the planet? I know time and resources are probably limited but jeez, next decade? Here's a tip. Go ahead and and develop a GeologyBot while you are at it. That way if you find DNA up there you can go ahead and have the GeologyBot look for fossils soon after. At least have some kind of Bot to take drilling core samples to get a look at what the geology of the planet was like.

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BadassChemist

02/11/11 at 7:10 pm

I think this is a great, though long overdue, thing for the world to invest it's space-agency dollars into. But I have one rule; If they find C24, they have to be careful or gtfo. On one hand, I want to be a superhuman, God damnit! On the other, I DO NOT want to become a zombie, then an Imp, then a Baron of Hell. Oh, and I want a BFG. Non-negotiable.

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