Science Daily — Key components of a new approach to discover life on Mars were successfully launched into space Friday as part of a twelve-day, low-Earth orbit experiment to assess their survivability in the space radiation environment–a prelude future journeys to Mars. Once in space the BIOPAN-6 platform will open to expose its contents directly to the space environment, testing both their resistance to space radiation and the space vacuum, before closing and returning to Earth on September 25th. Andrew Steele from the Carnegie Institution of Washington (USA) and one of the initial experiment proposers said, "in the USA we are currently flying related technology and components within the protected environment of the International Space Station (ISS) but this will be the first time that these types of materials will have flown unprotected in space in a manner similar to a flight to Mars. David Cullen, from Cranfield University (UK) and who leads the scientific input into the current experiment, said, "this will be our first space experiment to demonstrate our belief that immunoassay technology will have an important future role in space exploration and the search for life elsewhere in the Solar System. Mark Sims from the University of Leicester (UK) and who heads the overall LMC project said, "this mission will be an important stepping stone in our ultimate goal of putting a LMC experiment on the surface of Mars and using it to search for evidence of Life. read more

Technorati Tags: space, experiment, , lmc, components, mars, pregnancy news