The National Aeronautics and Space Administration believes that a University of Texas at Arlington chemistry professor's technology may hold the key for determining whether life could exist on Mars and could even help humans explore the Red Planet someday.
Purnendu "Sandy" Dasgupta has been awarded a $1.2 million grant to develop an ion chromatograph that is durable enough to withstand extraterrestrial extremes and sensitive enough to pick out differences between ions.
"He's developed a new system for testing the chemical composition of the soil on Mars," said Pamela Jansma, dean of UTA's College of Science. "We don't understand much about Martian soil, so for any kind of new technology to be able to adapt to the conditions of the Martian surface is new."
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