Thanks to mass spectrometers, space probes should be able to detect cellular material on individual ice grains.
The Solar System’s icy ocean moons are primary targets in our search for life. Missions to Europa and Enceladus will explore these moons from orbit, improving our understanding of them and their potential to support life. Both worlds emit plumes of water from their internal oceans, and the spacecraft sent to both worlds will examine those plumes and even sample them.
Mass spectrometers have been around for decades but have improved rapidly in recent years. Researchers working on developing more powerful mass spectrometry have won two Nobel Prizes: one for Physics in 1989 and one for Chemistry in 2002. The 2002 prize is of particular interest in this research because it was awarded for the development of techniques that allowed mass spectrometers to detect biological macromolecules, including proteins.
Europa also has cryovolcanic plumes. The Hubble Space Telescope spotted them in 2012, and then scientists working with data from the Galileo mission said that data supported the discovery. In their experiments, the researchers simulated how mass spectrometry could detect organic material in a tiny ice grain. The results showed that along with detecting expected non-organic chemicals, mass spectrometry also detected amino acids from“They are extremely small, so they are, in theory, capable of fitting into ice grains that are emitted from an ocean world like Enceladus or Europa,” Klenner said.
The drawing on the left shows Enceladus and its ice-covered ocean, with cracks near the south pole that are believed to penetrate through the icy crust. The middle panel shows where life could thrive: at the top of the water, in a proposed thin layer like on Earth’s oceans. The right panel shows that as gas bubbles rise and pop, bacterial cells could get lofted into space with droplets that then become the ice grains that were detected by Cassini.
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