An international team of scientists has created a small chemical laboratory to be mounted on the rover of ESA – Roscosmos ExoMars 2020. This laboratory called MOMA (acronym for Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer) will analyze the samples collected at a depth of about two meters from the drilling instrument.
Among the various analysis techniques, the most interesting will detect the chirality (see https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiralit%C3%A0_(chemistry) ), as requested for decades by Dr Gilbert Levin (see http://www.gillevin.com/Mars/L&PI_ABS_Final.pdf ).
In fact, chirality is the property of complex molecules to orient themselves specularly, thus developing in two opposite directions. This property allows to distinguish organic molecules of simple chemical origin from those of biological origin, due to the fact that the organic molecules of biological origin are all oriented in the same way!
Let’s hope that ExoMars 2020 will be able to land on Mars, without ending up like its “unlucky little brother” Schiaparelli.
This post has been automatically translated. See the original post here.