The Urey instrument, or Urey: Mars Organic and Oxidant Detector was a developmental spacecraft instrument for detecting organic compounds including

amino acid Amino acids are organic compounds that contain both amino and carboxylic acid functional groups. Although hundreds of amino acids exist in nature, by far the most important are the alpha-amino acids, which comprise proteins. Only 22 alpha ...

Overview

It was funded by NASA and tested in the

Atacama Desert The Atacama Desert ( es, Desierto de Atacama) is a desert plateau in South America covering a 1,600 km (990 mi) strip of land on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes Mountains. The Atacama Desert is the driest nonpolar desert in the ...

in the early 2000s. Urey was selected by NASA for further development in support ExoMars or any future Mars mission that could use Urey along with

Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer The Mars Organic Molecule Analyser (MOMA) is a mass spectrometer-based instrument on board the ''Rosalind Franklin'' rover to be launched in 2028 to Mars on an astrobiology mission.

. Urey is a design for in situ biomarker detection, and it was tested in the early 2000s. The device would also study the mysterious oxidants in Mars regolith. Urey was previously included on ExoMars rover, now the ''Rosalind Franklin'' rover, in one of its iterations, and would have searched for organic compounds in Martian rocks and soils as evidence for past life and/or prebiotic chemistry. Starting with a hot water extraction, only soluble compounds are left for further analysis. Sublimation, and

capillary electrophoresis Capillary electrophoresis (CE) is a family of electrokinetic separation methods performed in submillimeter diameter capillaries and in micro- and nanofluidic channels. Very often, CE refers to capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE), but other elect ...

makes it possible to identify amino acids. The detection would be by laser-induced

fluorescence Fluorescence is the emission of light by a substance that has absorbed light or other electromagnetic radiation. It is a form of luminescence. In most cases, the emitted light has a longer wavelength, and therefore a lower photon energy, ...

, a highly sensitive technique, capable of parts-per-trillion sensitivity. These measurements would be made at a thousand times greater sensitivity than the Viking GCMS experiment, and would significantly advance our understanding of the organic chemistry of

Martian soil Martian soil is the fine regolith (a blanket of unconsolidated, loose, heterogeneous superficial deposits covering solid rock) found on the surface of Mars. Its properties can differ significantly from those of terrestrial soil, including its to ...

s. Urey would follow up on the Viking results which were inclusive and only sampled the very near surface. Urey had been selected for a time to be on the Pasteur payload of the ''Rosalind Franklin'' rover, however, it was developed for any Mars mission not necessarily ExoMars and was funded independently by NASA. One of the components of Urey was the Mars Oxidant Instrument (MOI) and it was developed by NASA's

Ames Research Center The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) labora ...

. Urey Suite: * Subcritical Water Extractor * Mars Organic Detector * Micro-Capillary Electrophoresis Instrument * Mars Oxidant Instrument

Name

Urey is named after

Harold Clayton Urey Harold Clayton Urey ( ; April 29, 1893 – January 5, 1981) was an American physical chemist whose pioneering work on isotopes earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for the discovery of deuterium. He played a significant role in the d ...

(1893 – 1981) for his contributions to chemistry and other studies including winning the

Nobel Prize in Chemistry ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then "M ...

in 1934.

References

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External links

NASA - Sensor Being Developed to Check for Life on Mars 03.02.07
Spacecraft instruments ExoMars

Overview

Name

See also

References

External links