A team is developing new technologies to aid in the search for life in outer space

Are we the only ones in the universe? Since the discovery of ice-encrusted worlds in our solar system with possibly livable subterranean seas, a solution to that age-old issue has looked tantalizingly close. However, seeking signs of life in freezing sea hundreds of millions of kilometers distant has enormous obstacles. The scientific equipment utilized must be highly complicated while also being resistant to severe radiation and freezing temperatures. Furthermore, the equipment must be capable of performing a variety of independent, complementary measures that, when combined, might generate scientifically valid proof of life.

A team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California has created OWLS, a sophisticated array of research equipment unlike any other, to solve some of the challenges that future life-detection missions may face. OWLS, which stands for Oceans Worlds Life Surveyor, is intended to consume and analyze liquid samples. It has eight pieces of automated equipment that would take several dozen people to operate in a lab on Earth. One ambition for OWLS, according to Peter Willis, the project's co-principal investigator and science director, is to use it to examine frozen water from a vapor plume erupting from Saturn's moon Enceladus. How do you take a sprinkling of ice a billion miles from Earth and determine whether there's evidence of life in the one chance you've got, while everyone on Earth is waiting with bated breath? We intended to build the most powerful instrument system possible for that circumstance, one that could detect both chemical and biological indicators of life.

After a half-decade of labor, the project team tested its equipment, which was the size of a few file cabinets at the time, on the saline waters of Mono Lake in California's Eastern Sierra in June. OWLS discovered chemical and cellular evidence of life by employing built-in algorithms to detect such evidence without the need for human interaction.

According to Willis, we have demonstrated the first generation of the OWLS suite. The following phase will be to personalize and miniaturize it for various mission circumstances.

The OWLS team struggled with how to analyze liquid samples in space. Scientists on Earth may rely on gravity, a proper lab temperature, and air pressure to hold samples in place, but such circumstances do not present aboard a spaceship speeding through the solar system or on the frozen moon's surface. As a result, the team created two pieces of equipment capable of extracting and processing liquid samples in space. Because it's unclear what shape life may take on an ocean world, OWLS needs to have a wide spectrum of devices capable of monitoring everything from single molecules to microbes. To that purpose, the project combined two subsystems: one that performs a range of chemical analysis approaches using several pieces of equipment, and another that examines visual indications using various microscopes.

The OWLS microscope system would be the first in space that could image cells. It was created in collaboration with researchers at Portland State University in Oregon and combines a digital holographic microscope, which can identify cells and motion throughout the volume of a sample, with two fluorescent imagers, which use dyes to observe chemical content and cellular structures. They give overlapping images with a resolution of less than a single micron, or around 0.00004 inches.

The microscope component, known as the Extant Life Volumetric Imaging System (ELVIS), is unique in that it has no moving parts. It also uses machine-learning algorithms to recognize items illuminated by fluorescent chemicals, whether naturally existing in live organisms or additional dyes linked to cell components. It's like hunting for a needle in a haystack without having to pick up and analyze every single bit of hay, according to co-principal scientist Chris Lindensmith, who leads the microscope team. We're essentially taking large armfuls of hay and saying, 'Oh, there's needles here, here, and here.'

OWLS employs its Organic Capillary Electrophoresis Analysis System (OCEANS) to examine much smaller forms of evidence. This system essentially pressure-cooks liquid samples and feeds them to instruments that look for the chemical building blocks of life: all types of amino acids, as well as fatty acids and organic compounds. The device is so sensitive that it can identify previously undiscovered types of carbon. Willis, who oversaw OCEANS development, compares it to a shark, which can detect one molecule of blood in a billion molecules of water and determine the blood type. It would be just the second instrument system in orbit to undertake liquid chemical analysis, following NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander's Microscopy, Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer (MECA).

OCEANS employs a process known as capillary electrophoresis, which involves passing an electric current across a sample to split it into its constituents. The sample is subsequently sent through three different detectors, including a mass spectrometer, which is the most powerful instrument for detecting organic molecules. Because data transmission speeds are more limited than dial-up internet from the 1980s, only an estimated 0.0001% of the data produced by these subsystems can be transferred back to distant Earth. As a result, OWLS has been developed with "onboard science instrument autonomy." Computers would evaluate, summarize, prioritize, and choose just the most interesting data to be transmitted home using algorithms, while still providing a "manifest" of information remaining on board.

According to the project's instrument autonomy system engineer, Lukas Mandrake, "we're starting to ask questions now that require more sophisticated instruments." Are any of these other worlds habitable? Is there scientific evidence for life, rather than just a hunch that it exists? That necessitates equipment that collect a large amount of data, which is what OWLS and its science autonomy are designed to do.