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Fatty Acid Recovery And Identification In Mars Analogue Soil Samples, Kimberly E. Lykens
Fatty Acid Recovery And Identification In Mars Analogue Soil Samples, Kimberly E. Lykens
STAR Program Research Presentations
A primary goal of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission is to gather and store samples of Mars soil that could possibly be returned to Earth in a future mission for investigations into past or present life. In years leading up to a potential sample return mission on Mars and potentially other worlds, samples taken from Chile’s Atacama Desert, the most arid, biologically limited desert in the world, are valuable in developing a capacity for biosignature detection, specifically when exploring fatty acid abundance. Eighteen samples were collected from two sites in the Atacama characterized by biological soil crusts (BSC). BSCs are areas …