SenseLife: Searching for Life Beyond Earth
Are we alone in the universe? What about our own solar system? Could extraterrestrial organisms survive or even develop elsewhere?
The SenseLife project is an interdisciplinary collaboration combining microbiology, physics, engineering, and computer science to search for life beyond Earth. This search relies on so-called biosignatures – scientific indicators of past or present life. One of the most compelling biosignatures is homochirality, a hallmark of all known living organisms, and most likely a universal sign of life.
The SenseLife project is developing a novel optical instrument, FlyPol, which uses the unique properties of homochirality to remotely detect living organisms. FlyPol employs high-sensitivity nearly-simultaneous full-Stokes spectropolarimetry to detect circularly polarized light, a phenomenon associated with homochirality. Initial studies have successfully demonstrated the detection of plants using this technology.
Our next big challenge is to “go small” and detect microscopic organisms that could potentially survive the harsh conditions found on other planetary bodies in our solar system.
