When you’re searching for signs of alien life, you’d really like definitive answers. But so far most of humanity’s forays into the Solar System seeking signs of life have returned only ambiguity.

Take NASA’s Viking 1 lander for instance. The agency designed its suite of experiments to find any signs of life, or biosignatures, on the Martian surface, returned a mix of positive and negative results that summed to an indeterminate answer — scientists found no signs of life, but insufficient evidence to say there were no signs to be found.

“We always want to avoid false positives,” University of Maryland professor of geology Ricardo Arevalo tells Inverse. But “you also want to avoid false negatives. You think, ‘oh, there’s nothing exciting to see here,’ but it turns out you may have just missed it because your technology was limited.”

Since 2014, however, Arevalo has been working with a team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on a new tool that might make sure future astrobiology experiments return clearer answers about what they find, and what they don’t, wherever they look.

In a paper published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, Arevalo and his colleagues describe a Laser Desorption Mass Spectrometer, or LDMS device using a cutting analysis tool first pioneered in the pharmaceutical industry. Using a laser to ionize material from, say, the surface ice of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, the instrument can detect larger organic compounds than any of the biosignature detecting tools currently aboard NASA missions.

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