The Urey Instrument: An Advanced In Situ Organic and Oxidant Detector for Mars Exploration

Abstract

The Urey organic and oxidant detector consists of a suite of instruments designed to search for several classes of organic molecules in the martian regolith and ascertain whether these compounds were produced by biotic or abiotic processes using chirality measurements. These experiments will also determine the chemical stability of organic molecules within the host regolith based on the presence and chemical reactivity of surface and atmospheric oxidants. Urey has been selected for the Pasteur payload on the European Space Agency's (ESA's) upcoming 2013 ExoMars rover mission. The diverse and effective capabilities of Urey make it an integral part of the payload and will help to achieve a large portion of the mission's primary scientific objective: "to search for signs of past and present life on Mars." This instrument is named in honor of Harold Urey for his seminal contributions to the fields of cosmochemistry and the origin of life.

Searching for Life on Mars: Degradation of Surfactant Solutions Used in Organic Extraction Experiments

“…Altering the temperature and pressure of subcritical water changes its polarity and allows it to dissolve nonpolar species such as aliphatic hydrocarbons much more efficiently than under normal conditions Aubrey et al, 2008). This technique was to be used on Mars by the proposed Urey instrument (Bada et al, 2005;Aubrey et al, 2008), having been tested by successfully extracting amino acids from an Atacama Desert soil sample (Amashukeli et al, 2007.…”

Extracting organic matter on Mars: A comparison of methods involving subcritical water, surfactant solutions and organic solvents

“…During subcritical water extraction, the polarity of water can be altered by fine-tuning the pressure and temperature (Table 1; Amashukeli et al, 2008;Aubrey et al, 2008). The efficacy of subcritical water extraction for isolating organic compounds has been used to extract organic pollutants from environmental solids (Hawthorne et al, 1994), harmful dioxins from soil (Hashimoto et al, 2004) and antioxidants from fruits and vegetables (Garcia-Marino et al, 2006;Singh and Saldaña, 2011).…”

Astrobiology and habitability studies in preparation for future Mars missions: trends from investigating minerals, organics and biota

“…He et al 2005) and DNA-clay binding can increase at acidic pH (Khanna & Stotzky 1992). The Urey instrument, an advanced in situ organic and oxidant detector, originally proposed for the Exomars mission, developed a sub-critical water extraction system to separate and concentrate the organic compounds from the mineral matrix (Aubrey et al 2008). Due to the potential difficulty of extracting organic matter from mineral matrices because of adsorption and/or potential substitution within the mineral structure (Kotler et al 2009), direct laser desorption and ionization techniques (such as those being explored for the Exomars mission) and related techniques for sample return missions (Yan et al 2007;Kotler et al 2008;Richardson et al 2008) may provide the needed methods to release and detect potential biosignatures.…”