Arkansas News Bureau

LITTLE ROCK — NASA has awarded a team of Arkansas researchers a $1.5 million grant to develop a system to look for signs of life on Mars, officials at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock announced Monday.

The Arkansas NASA Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research team, which includes scientists from UALR, Arkansas Tech University in Russellville and Harding University in Searcy, was among 27 teams NASA selected for funding during a national competition.

The Arkansas team won for its proposal “Mobile Surveying for Atmospheric and Near-Surface Gases of Biological Origin.”

Team member Keith Hudson, director of UALR’s Graduate Institute of Technology, said the researchers are developing a system to look for signs of life in a broad region around a landing site on Mars.

“The system consists of an open path spectrometer on a rover, and is designed to rapidly search an area hundreds of meters or more in diameter around a landing site for water vapor and biogenic gases in the Martian atmosphere,” Hudson said. “Once a subsurface source of a biogenic gas is detected, the system can localize the source of emissions, enabling NASA to conduct further investigations of the site.”

The proposed system could answer questions about the existence of life or its precursors in the solar system, atmospheric chemistry on Mars and the presence and distribution of subsurface water on Mars. The team hopes to advance the project to the point where it can be included on a Mars mission in the next decade.

Other scientists on the team include Gary Anderson of UALR, Charles Wu of Arkansas Tech University and Edmond Wilson and Constance Meadors, both of Harding University.

The grant, which requires campus matching funds, is part of $19 million in grants NASA awarded to colleges and universities nationwide to fund research and development of new technology in areas important to the agency. NASA received 50 proposals and chose 27 through a merit-based, peer-reviewed competition.