14 DAY TRIAL // Experts with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are currently developing a new tool capable of detecting DNA on another planet. They plan to send it to Mars aboard a future rover.
The team's main objective is to determine whether the Red Planet ever had lifeforms that contained DNA. They also want to learn whether some of those potential lifeforms made their way to Earth.
The hypothesis that the two planets may have exchanged genetic information at some point is beginning to garner a lot of support in the international scientific community.
Moving DNA across planets is possible via meteorites. The space rocks are produced when a larger impactor slams into one of the planet, raising debris high in orbit. After spending millions of years in space, the rocks can then make their way to another planet.
Astronomers have already discovered several meteorites on Earth that were demonstrated to have arrived here from Mars. All of them have been scanned for lifeforms, but the results are controversial.
As such, scientists with the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences are planning to take the “fight” to our neighboring planet, aboard a proposed rover that will fly in 2018, Daily Galaxy reports.
Given the ample evidence hinting at the possibility that life exists on Mars, it's not unreasonable to assume that microorganisms may have been exchanged between the two worlds some 3.5 to 4 billion years ago.
Most of the space rocks that came here from the Red Planet arrived during that time. If life had a common origin on the two planets, then it could be that lifeforms managed to adapt to the extreme environment on Mars over the subsequent billions of years.
MIT experts and Harvard Medical School genetic professor Gary Ruvkun are therefore working with NASA funding to develop a sensor that could tease out DNA fossils from Martian soils. The project is called the Search for Extraterrestrial Genomes (SETG).
The detector would look for DNA polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a common approach to detecting life today. The PCR detector that will go on Mars is still in early development, but it will be sensitive enough to detect small traces of genetic material, if they exist.
At this point, not many details are known about the new device. However, there is a growing consensus among planetary scientists that the results sent back by the Viking and Phoenix landers are not exactly complete, and that further work is needed to either confirm or deny past or present life on Mars.