Alumni Feature
MARS MISSION
Searching for Signs of Ancient Life on Mars t
o get to the bottom of a mystery, the great detective Sherlock Holmes often fixed his eyes close to the ground to carefully examine a fresh crime scene in search of the most minute-sized clues. Within the next year, a scientific instrument designed by NASA, named SHERLOC, will be doing the same thing on Mars, thanks to the work of 2000 applied optics alumnus Brian Monacelli and a team of engineers and scientists at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. Only instead of solving some Earth-bound mystery, this SHERLOC will be trying to answer the question: Billions of years ago, was there life on Mars? SHERLOC stands for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and
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STORY BY ARTHUR FOULKES
Chemicals–a true mouthful. The instrument, a spectrometer, will use sophisticated optical devices, including an ultraviolet laser that fluoresces chemicals, to scan the surface and near-subsurface of Mars in search of organic and chemical evidence that life ever existed on the Red Planet. “It will be looking for chemicals that are indicative of life,” says Monacelli, a five-year veteran of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission team. He was responsible for alignment and testing of SHERLOC’s optical systems. SHERLOC will be mounted at the end of a robotic arm attached to Perseverance, the remote-controlled six-wheel Mars 2020 rover, which engineers and scientists will direct from millions of miles away through the Deep Space Network from NASA facilities on Earth.
