"We are very excited about this," said Luann Becker, research scientist with the Institute of Crustal Studies at UC Santa Barbara. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity." Testing by the two NASA rovers that are currently operating on Mars has spurred interest in developing different, new, and highly-sensitive instruments to search for present or past life on Mars. The ExoMars rover will contain a drill that can reach soil samples up to two meters under the Martian surface in search of extinct or extant life.
Becker, trained as an oceanographer and geochemist, is deeply involved in the study of the origin, evolution and distribution of life in the universe, a field known as exobiology. She is known for her development of a theory about a mass extinction (much earlier than that of the dinosaurs) and her team's finding of evidence of the impact of a meteor 250 million years ago in an area off the coast of present-day Australia. The impact apparently ushered in a period called the "Great Dying," the largest extinction event in the history of life on Earth, when 90 percent of marine life and 80 percent of life on land became extinct.
She anticipates that the American contribution to the Molecular Organic Molecule Analyzer (MOMA) development by the European Space Agency (ESA) will be funded by NASA. MOMA will be included as part of the ExoMars mission to Mars in 2011.
The discovery in 1996 of organic molecules enclosed in a meteorite that may be of Martian origin revived interest in the study of Martian soil. One entire category of meteorites on Earth has been identified to be of possible Martian origin because
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Contact: Gail Gallessich
gail.g@ia.ucsb.edu
805-893-7220
University of California - Santa Barbara
13-Dec-2005