Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Life Imitates Star Trek: NASA Pursues Life Scanner

SpaceToys.com Authentic NASA Toys and Replicas
With scientists attempting to build technology to locate life on other worlds, they may be constructing a useful device to locate lost future travelers hiking on foreign soils.

(Red Orbit) NASA-funded researchers are refining a tool that could not only check for the faintest traces of life's molecular building blocks on Mars, but could also determine whether they have been produced by anything alive. [...]

"Urey will be able to detect key molecules associated with life at a sensitivity roughly a million times greater than previous instrumentation," said Dr. Jeffrey Bada of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. Bada is the principal investigator for an international team of scientists and engineers working on various components of the device.


Despite the fact it may be a century before we find any signs of life on Mars (although we may have settled the planet by then), this life scanner could prove to be quite useful not only on planets, but for detecting life aboard dying space craft as well (an advanced version for rescuers that is).




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You can either visit the stars or watch them from afar.

But if you choose the former, you'll definitely get a better view.

~Darnell Clayton, 2007

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