New Alien Hunter Tool Developed To Catch The Faintest Of Alien Life Signatures

The hunt for aliens has attracted a lot of attention of scientists as well as common people recently. More and more numbers of scientists across the world are working on developing new methods and technologies that may be helpful in the furtherance of research and exploration of alien life on other planets.

Giant space telescopes and rovers are the chief alien hunter tools employed by NASA in searching for signatures of alien life on the Moon, Mars and possibly other planets. Though NASA's Curiosity rover has revealed some interesting evidence that indicates past existence of alien life on the planet, no substantial evidence that can confirm this hypothesis has been obtained yet.

Recently, a group of scientists developed a molecular tool that can detect the signatures of alien life with high sensitivity than all the presently available instruments used in spaceflight missions, Knowridge reported.

The study published in the ACS journal Analytical Chemistry explains that the search and detection for alien life could be more effectively accomplished by analyzing the patterns of amino acids, which are the building blocks of all life forms on Earth.

However, the appropriate tools required to do so was lacking until now. Furthermore, the existing methods of amino acid monitoring used by Curiosity for study of the Martian surface was ineffective due to non-specific reactions with other organic and inorganic molecules.

The newly developed method is based on capillary electrophoresis of the samples, which help in simultaneous identification of 17 amino acids with high sensitivity. Presence of these amino acids can confirm the present or previous existence of life forms on the Moon, Mars or other space objects.

The method was tested by researchers by analyzing the samples obtained from California's Mono Lake, which is an extremely salty body of water, which is analogous to the high salt water bodies present on Mars and some other moons.

The Irish News reported that the newly developed molecular tool can be used in space missions for the study of planets and satellites viz. Enceladus, Saturn's moon, and Europa, Jupiter's moon, in the near future.