Overview

Scientists at NASA have developed a new device called Oceans Worlds Life Surveyor (OWLS) that can remotely and autonomously analyze liquid samples from icy moons and detect signs of alien life. The best part is that the instrument is ready to fly to deep space, so we won’t have to wait long to find out what lurks in watery worlds.

The science and other stuff to know

The search for the “life beyond” is one of the most fascinating scientific endeavors underway. Without ways to send humans or robots to distant worlds, scientists have been working to come up with methods that can work from a distance.

That was part of the mission when NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory designed OWLS. The system is “designed to ingest and analyze liquid samples” using eight separate instruments, potentially from an erupting vapor plume such as those seen on Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

According to NASA, the instrument can collect huge tranches of data and autonomously analyze it to hopefully discover life by itself. Once the analysis is complete, it can send just the relevant results back to Earth.

The research team tested the device on the salty water of Mono Lake in California, which scientists think may not be too dissimilar to the salty waters of Europa and Enceladus’ oceans. The instrument successfully found chemical and cellular evidence of life, without human intervention.

Now, with a bit of downsizing, OWLS will be ready to take on the icy moons, its developers say.

“We have demonstrated the first generation of the OWLS suite,” Peter Willis, who’s OWLS’ co-principal investigator, said in a NASA press release. “The next step is to customize and miniaturize it for specific mission scenarios.”

So what?

The OWLS will help answer the million-dollar question of whether there’s life beyond Earth and provide proof.

“We’re starting to ask questions now that necessitate more sophisticated instruments,” Lukas Mandrake, an autonomy system engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in the NASA statement. “Are some of these other planets habitable? Is there defensible scientific evidence for life rather than a hint that it might be there? That requires instruments that take a lot of data. And that’s what OWLS and its science autonomy are set up to accomplish.”

“We wanted to create the most powerful instrument system you could design… to look for both chemical and biological signs of life,” co-principal investigator Peter Willis added.

While OWLS is designed for use within our solar system, another research team has been looking for ways to determine if there’s life on exoplanets.

What’s next?

The development of OWLS coincides with the launch of the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) into space in April 2023. NASA also has the Europa Clipper mission, which launches in October 2024.