- September 04, 2026
- By Georgia Jiang
Scientists and stargazers for centuries have pondered the question: Is there life beyond Earth? Today, scientific missions seeking an answer on distant planets face severe challenges, including instrumentation with limited operational lifetimes and the need to justify every gram launched across the solar system.
A team of researchers in the University of Maryland’s Department of Geological, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences 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. 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.
There’s more to seeking evidence of life on other planets that just surveying the landscape, said Professor Ricardo Arévalo Jr., the project’s principal investigator. 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, including 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.
“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.”
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 multiple tests on the same, often microscopic, sample.
FLEX will help to solve this problem by facilitating two jobs at once. When its 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 1 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.
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.
“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.”