Life detection in Martian returned samples: correlation between analytical techniques and biological signatures

Abstract

Abstract As soon as samples collected from Mars will be brought back to Earth, the samples will be placed inside a receiving facility to check for the presence of life. There is a large number of approaches that were proposed on the techniques to be used to investigate the presence of life and any biological risk in the returned samples. Another interesting approach was reported by Kminek in which suggestions were provided on how to organize the sample analysis sequence within the facility. Finally, another study suggested a long list of techniques capable of measuring biological signatures based on their general characteristics: global, morphological, mineralogical, organic, molecular and biochemical, isotopic analysis. Despite the effort of the cited studies, there is still the need of a critical approach to make an actual comparison between the techniques, with the aim to find a ranking. In this work, we focused on the construction of a correlation matrix with which to correlate biosignatures to analytical techniques. It is known that a number of techniques can detect biological signatures and, at the same time, each technique can be applied to multiple biological signatures. Using this method, it is possible to summarize all this information to be easily consulted, but also to define in a quantitative way how strong each correlation is.