{"id":1956,"date":"2021-02-18T12:20:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-18T20:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/news\/stories\/mars-rover-perseverance-will-look-for-signs-of-life-backed-by-usc-dornsife-research\/"},"modified":"2024-05-14T18:41:47","modified_gmt":"2024-05-15T01:41:47","slug":"mars-rover-perseverance-sherloc-developed-at-usc-dornsife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/news\/stories\/mars-rover-perseverance-sherloc-developed-at-usc-dornsife\/","title":{"rendered":"Mars rover Perseverance will look for signs of life backed by USC Dornsife research"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n    \n            \n\n  \n    \n\n\n\n\n\n\n<div\n  class=\"cc--component-container cc--article-hero \"\n\n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  >\n  <div class=\"c--component c--article-hero\"\n    \n      >\n\n    \n<div class=\"inner-wrapper\">\n          \n<div class=\"f--field f--image\">\n\n    \n    \n    \n    \n    \n    \n              \n      <img\n                            data-src=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2023\/04\/story-3407-768x432.jpg\"\n          data-srcset=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2023\/04\/story-3407-768x432.jpg 768w\"          data-sizes=\"(min-width:1200px) 75vw, (min-width:768px) 83vw, 100vw\"          class=\"lazyload\"\n        \n                  alt=\"Mars rover Perseverance will look for signs of life backed by USC Dornsife research\"\n        \n        \n                                      \/>\n\n    \n    \n  \n  \n\n<\/div>\n  \n      <div class=\"image-caption\">\n          \n<div class=\"f--field f--description\">\n\n    \n  Mars rover <em>Perseverance<\/em>, shown probing the surface of Mars in this illustration, carries instrumentation designed in large part at USC Dornsife to find signs of life on the red planet. (Image source: NASA\/JPL-Caltech.)\n\n\n<\/div>\n    <\/div>\n  \n  <div class=\"text-wrapper\">\n          <nav aria-label=\"Breadcrumb\" class=\"breadcrumbs\">\n        <ul>\n                      <li><a href=\"\/news\/stories\/\">News<\/a><\/li>\n                      <li><a href=\"\/news\/stories\/\/?category=faculty\">Faculty<\/a><\/li>\n                  <\/ul>\n      <\/nav>\n    \n              \n<div class=\"f--field f--page-title\">\n\n    \n  <h1>Mars rover Perseverance will look for signs of life backed by USC Dornsife research<\/h1>\n\n\n<\/div>\n    \n          <div class=\"subtitle\">\n            \n<div class=\"f--field f--description\">\n\n    \n  For more than a decade, a team of scientists helped develop SHERLOC, the ultraviolet laser technology that probes the red planet for chemicals produced by living organisms. <strong>[4\u00bd min read]<\/strong>\n\n\n<\/div>\n      <\/div>\n    \n           <strong class=\"author-field\"><span >By<\/span><a href=\"mailto:communication@dornsife.usc.edu\">Darrin S. Joy<\/a><\/strong>\n    \n          <span class=\"post-date-field\">February 18, 2021<\/span>\n      <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n  <\/div><\/div>\n\n  \n    \n\n\n\n\n\n\n<div\n  class=\"cc--component-container cc--social-share \"\n\n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  >\n  <div class=\"c--component c--social-share\"\n    \n      >\n\n    \n  <div class=\"content-wrapper\">\n    <span class=\"a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list\" style=\"line-height: 32px;\">\n      <span class=\"title\">\n        Share\n      <\/span>\n                        <a class=\"a2a_button_copy_link\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"\/#copy_link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"Link\">\n            <span class=\"a2a_svg a2a_s__default a2a_s_copy_link\">\n              <svg height=\"19\" viewBox=\"0 0 19 19\" width=\"19\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\"><path d=\"m7.43475275 9.52380952-2.17490843 2.26076008c-1.08745421 1.058837-1.68841575 2.518315-1.68841575 4.0350275 0 1.5167124.60096154 2.9475732 1.68841575 4.0350274 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<p>Throughout much of 2020, observers in the Northern Hemisphere found themselves tracking the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn as they appeared to inch closer to one another each evening, culminating in a historic conjunction low in the southwestern sky a few days before Christmas.<\/p>\n<p>But twinkling bright and amber, farther north and east, Mars awaited a more intimate encounter with a much smaller object \u2014 one made by human hands.<\/p>\n<p>The Mars rover <i>Perseverance<\/i>, sent skyward on July 30, 2020, from Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral, hurtled through 300 million miles of space, reaching for the god of war\u2019s namesake planet in arguably the most ambitious space mission to date.<\/p>\n<p>On Feb. 18, <i>Perseverance<\/i> sets down in Jezero Crater, just north of Mars\u2019 equator in the eastern hemisphere.<\/p>\n<p>Aside from the historic helicopter, <i>Ingenuity<\/i>, designed to test powered flight in the Martian atmosphere, the robotic rover features a powerful system for detecting signs of life. Not the lumbering beasts or humanoids envisioned by a generation of science fiction authors, of course, but rather microscopic lifeforms akin to bacteria or algae found on Earth.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/mars.nasa.gov\/mars2020\/spacecraft\/instruments\/sherloc\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman &amp; Luminescence for Organics &amp; Chemicals<\/a> \u2014 more commonly known by its nerd-chic acronym \u201cSHERLOC\u201d \u2014 will search for subtle clues any microbes may have left behind.<\/p>\n<p>SHERLOC uses technology developed under the direction of Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences Ken Nealson at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.<\/p>\n<p>A <a href=\"https:\/\/news.usc.edu\/1586\/Mysteries-on-Mars\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">renowned microbiologist and astrobiologist<\/a> whose work includes the discovery of bacteria that live in extremely harsh conditions and can use <a href=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/news\/stories\/2774\/strings-of-electron-carrying-proteins-may-hold-the-secret-to-ele\/\">rocks to breathe<\/a>, Nealson worked to develop a component of SHERLOC called the deep ultra-violet microscope. The effort began in 1998, shortly after he became a senior scientist at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an adjunct professor at Caltech.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy job was to set up a group in astrobiology, with a focus on life detection,\u201d Nealson said.<\/p>\n<p>One of the first people he hired was Rohit Bhartia, who would later earn a Ph.D. under Nealson\u2019s mentorship at USC Dornsife. Early on, the duo settled on developing a microscopic imaging system that could function on Mars and readily identify complex molecules.<\/p>\n<div class=\"news-image-landscape news-image-right\">\n<figure style=\"width: 900px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/migration-uploads\/Mars_Sherloc_InStoryA-3407.jpg\" alt=\"Close-up photo of SCHERLOC device\" width=\"900\" height=\"580\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">SHERLOC uses a deep UV microscope USC Dornsife scientists helped develop. (Image source: NASA\/JPL-Caltech.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<p>To accomplish this, the team needed a deep UV laser, which emits a tight beam of light that\u2019s deep in the ultraviolet end of the spectrum.<\/p>\n<p>Deep UV light has a shorter wavelength, enabling it to penetrate samples \u2014 including Martian soil and rocks \u2014 while causing organic molecules to glow with fluorescence. It has the added advantage of not stimulating the usual fluorescence of common minerals, which would cloud its ability to discern those organic molecules.<\/p>\n<p>Today, SHERLOC\u2019s deep UV laser is incredibly compact, but that wasn\u2019t the case back in the late \u201990s, when the research began.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt required a large refrigeration system to cool the laser, which was huge \u2026 and required kilowatts of power \u2014 hardly the thing one might fly to Mars,\u201d Nealson said.<\/p>\n<p>But the team showed that the approach could work in principle, and by the time Nealson joined USC Dornsife in 2001, a much smaller deep UV laser that used far less power was available commercially.<\/p>\n<p>A few years after that, \u201cthe entire system was the size of a large desk-top microscope and required only milliwatts of power,\u201d he said, but still too large to fly to Mars.<\/p>\n<p>Nealson and Bhartia continued work on the deep UV microscope for several years at USC Dornsife, working with a team that included Jan Amend, professor of Earth sciences and biological sciences, and Moh El-Naggar, Dean\u2019s Professor of Physics and Astronomy and professor of physics and chemistry, as well as students and post-doctoral fellows. Their work showed that the microscope could be used to identify bacteria without having to use dyes to stain the cells. It could also be used on dry samples to distinguish many different molecules \u2014 a key necessity in the arid Martian environment.<\/p>\n<p>Eventually, JPL engineers were able to make the deep UV microscope compact enough to mount on <i>Perseverance<\/i>\u2019s robotic arm, where it is combined with other instrumentation that expands the number of chemicals the system can detect.<\/p>\n<p>In what is the culmination of nearly 25 years of work on Nealson\u2019s part, scientists will implement SHERLOC almost immediately after the rover touches down, aiming to learn about the types and amounts of organic and inorganic compounds on and just beneath the Martian surface. Should they detect possible chemical signatures of life, they can choose to bring samples back to Earth for deeper analysis.<\/p>\n<p>Interestingly, Nealson says he argued to make certain SHERLOC\u2019s instruments weren\u2019t too sensitive because it might pick up trace chemicals, fooling scientists into believing a sample is more promising than it actually is.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf there is or was life on Mars, it would be expected to be \u2018housed\u2019 in some kinds of cells, at high concentrations,\u201d Nealson said, which means instruments with lower resolution and less sensitivity would detect these tiny, concentrated packets of life molecules while avoiding false-positive results. It is those samples, Nealson says, that are worth the long, complicated and expensive process of sending back to Earth so they can be examined for traces of life.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI would hope that at low resolution, some very weak signals would tell us where to look with higher resolution, revealing the localization of organic matter in cell-like bodies,\u201d he said. \u201cThat is my dream \u2014 to bring back those samples.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n  <\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For more than a decade, a team of scientists helped develop SHERLOC, the ultraviolet laser technology that probes the red planet for chemicals produced by living organisms. <strong>[4\u00bd min read]<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":1959,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,17],"tags":[323,159,324,518],"class_list":["post-1956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faculty","category-student","tag-astrobiology","tag-earth-sciences","tag-ken-nealson","tag-mars-rover"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Mars rover Perseverance will look for signs of life backed by USC Dornsife research<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"For more than a decade, a team of scientists helped develop SHERLOC, the ultraviolet laser technology that probes the red planet for chemicals produced by living organisms.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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