Nasa’s Chemical Laptop will help rovers hunt for alien life

The battery-powered Chemical Laptop will require a liquid sample for analysis.

Even as Nasa’s surface rovers are exploring planets, the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has developed what they are calling a “Chemical Laptop”. This is essentially a tricked out laptop in terms of its power and processing capabilities, and the idea is to use it to detect signs of life on other planets. While they look very similar to regular laptops, they are much thicker because they pack in more hardware and parts. These laptops, which will be sent on rovers, will essentially be small and portable laboratories which will instantly analyze samples picked up from the surface of other planets to identify traces of substances such as amino acids and fatty acids, which basically indicated present or past life.
Amino acids are building blocks of proteins, while fatty acids are key components of cell membranes, and both are essential to life.
The battery-powered Chemical Laptop will require a liquid sample for analysis, something that may not always be possible to obtain on all planets (for example, Mars). “This could also be an especially useful tool for icy-worlds targets such as Enceladus and Europa. All you would need to do is melt a little bit of the ice, and you could sample it and analyze it directly,” says Jessica Creamer, a Nasa post-doctoral fellow based at JPL.
Once the sample is available, the laptop mixes it with a fluorescent dye, which attaches the dye to the amino acids or fatty acids. At the second stage, the amino acids or fatty acids are separated from one another. Once the separation is done, the separated elements are picked out by a detection laser, which allows researchers on Earth to analyze the specific type of amino or fatty acids.
Nasa scientists are comparing this tool to something seen in the Star Trek movies. “Like a tricorder from Star Trek, the Chemical Laptop is a miniaturized on-the-go laboratory, which researchers hope to send one day to another planetary body such as Mars or Europa. It is roughly the size of a regular computing laptop, but much thicker to make room for chemical analysis components inside. But unlike a tricorder, it has to ingest a sample to analyze it,” they said in an official statement.
The Chemical Laptop is all set for a field test in the Atacama Desert in Chile, though Nasa hasn’t given the exact timelines for that yet.

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