Their work could double the scientific output of future missions searching for life on Mars, Saturn’s moon Enceladus and beyond.
Is there life beyond Earth? For hundreds of years, scientists have pondered this question. Now, scientific missions seeking to answer that query on distant planets face unique challenges: launched spacecraft have limited operational lifetimes, and because they can’t carry much equipment with them, every gram of instrumentation must earn its place.
A team of researchers in the University of Maryland’s Department of Geological, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences (GEPS) was awarded a three-year, $1.1 million grant from NASA to help solve this problem by developing one life-detecting instrument that can perform the work of two. Awarded through NASA’s Planetary Instrument Concepts for the Advancement of Solar System Observations (PICASSO) program, the grant funds the development of the Flexible Laser EXperiment (FLEX)—a tool that could help future space missions identify signs of life on other worlds more effectively and efficiently than ever before. The PICASSO portfolio focuses on early-stage ideas that would support the development of instrument hardware which would enhance or enable to scientific return on future planetary missions.
GEPS Professor Ricardo Arévalo Jr., the project’s principal investigator, explained that searching for life on another planet is much more difficult than it sounds. Finding an organic molecule—the building block of life—in a planetary rock sample isn’t enough to confirm life existed at that location. Scientists also need to understand the environment it came from—the surrounding minerals, the rock's chemistry, and whether local conditions could have supported living organisms. Without that context, even a promising discovery is hard to trust.
Typically, gathering critical information about the sample and the surrounding environment requires either two separate instruments (a significant constraint on the mass, power, and energy budgets of missions to space) or running multiple tests on the same, often microscopic, sample.
“If you do find potential evidence for life, it’s far more convincing when it’s not limited to just one observation,” Arévalo said. “If you see an organic molecule alongside a mineral that microbes like, or one that forms in water-rich environments, you’ve now got a composition and a setting. That would be a real step forward to discerning if life exists or existed elsewhere and understanding how it emerged.”
FLEX will be designed to help to solve this problem by facilitating two jobs at once. When the system’s laser system hits a rock or soil sample on a planetary surface, it releases a cloud of particles, some charged and some neutral (or uncharged). The FLEX interface—essentially a sophisticated delivery system—will capture both types of particles and route them in parallel to two different analyzers: one specialized for detecting biosignatures and the other for reading the geological story of the surrounding environment.
The result: Every laser pulse produces twice as much scientific information as a conventional instrument, without requiring a significantly larger footprint or more time, energy, or sample material.
For researchers like Arévalo, these benefits could make a real difference. When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned samples from the asteroid Bennu in 2023, Arévalo’s team received just one milligram of material—roughly the size of a single grain of sand. Having to run multiple sequential tests on a sample that small risks using it up before all the relevant data can be collected.
“An instrument that captures everything simultaneously makes every speck of sample count,” Arévalo noted. “It’s very important when we have so many resource limitations to consider.”
The team’s design also solves a practical headache for spacecraft engineers. Traditional instruments generally need to be positioned very closely, almost directly on top of a sample. This means landers require a dedicated robotic arm or sample handling system just to deliver material for testing. But the team’s new FLEX interface uses a flexible conduit instead; it can carry particles to the analyzer without needing the sample to be transported to the analyzers.
“That gives the mission additional flexibility because you can mount the instrument pretty much anywhere on a spacecraft, just as long as we have our little conduit to bring the sample to it,” Arévalo said.
Though the instrumental interface is still in early development, Arévalo’s team hopes to use FLEX to look for signs of life in some of the most exciting destinations in the solar system. Mars remains an obvious target. NASA is also increasingly interested in icy moons and the outer solar system, where scientists believe there are conditions that may allow liquid water oceans to exist beneath their frozen surfaces. Earth's own moon is another possibility—not for detecting biosignatures, but to characterize water as the Artemis program expands NASA's lunar presence.
For Arévalo, the grant represents more than a research milestone. He sees it as a significant step toward answering a question that has captivated scientists and non-scientists alike for generations. He noted that a comparable device that his team developed in the past few years has already reached the point of being mission-ready, a path he hopes to follow with FLEX.
“I'm excited,” he said. “It positions UMD to respond to a wider range of planetary mission opportunities and expands our potential impact, especially as NASA moves toward missions focused on finding life.”
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In addition to Arévalo, other UMD co-investigators of the project include GEPS Ph.D. student Lucas Andrews, assistant research scientist Benjamin Farcy, and associate research engineer Adrian Southard. Mazdak Taghioskoui, CEO of Trace Matters Scientific and inventor of FLEX’s SPion® flexible ion conduit, is also a key co-investigator of the project.
