'A very real possibility': Islander working with NASA to look for signs of life in space

A man that once called Cornwall, P.E.I., home is now part of a project at NASA that's getting out-of-this-worldattention.

Investigation scientist Peter Willis is working with a team to develop miniaturized chemistry instruments meant to look for signs of life on faraway icy moons.

In a phone call from California, he said the instruments could help find valuable clues that the naked eye might miss.

"Even if you don't see an alien walking around or swimming underneath the ice on one of these places, you could still look at the ice or at the rocks or just take a little tiny piece of suspicious-looking material and you could do a chemistry analysis on it to see if it contains these signs of life."

To the moons

As part of its recent work, which focuses on analyzing amino acids, the team has invented a new method of testing for these signs. Willis said this has attracted a "tremendous amount" of interest and press coverage.

This work is part of the broader planning efforts for future robotics missions that will take place on moons in the outer solar system. Willis said the moons are similar in size to the earth's, but have a different composition, with an ice water shell over top of a liquid ocean.

Both Jupiter and Saturn have one, and there is a proposed mission to the former's moon, which is called Europa.

Breaking it down

Willis said the missionwill focusentirely on chemical analyses of ice and water, work that he said is being done only by his team.

"I participate in these think tank processes where we'll get a whole bunch of people from all over the world...and the resounding conclusion of all those people is that the way to go is to not do what we did in the past for the Viking mission, for example," he said, referring to the 1975 biology experiments on Mars. "That's totally ambiguous, it's still ambiguous, we're still arguing over that and it was 40 years ago."

Willis said there are different ways to look for signs of life.

One is to use a high-powered microscope to try to identify cells floating around in the water, while another is to look for molecules themselves.

'A very real possibility' of life in space

While he said some scientists consider it too "science fiction-y" to talk aboutactual creatures living on far-off icy moons,he saidthere is "a very real possibility that there are things swimming around on Europa right now. That's not at all an unreasonable hypothesis.

"If we could get through the ice shell, there could be a gigantic moon-sized ecosystem underneath the ice, swimming around and interacting and doing all kinds of stuff that we don't know right now."

Why you should care

In addition to itbeing a "noble pursuit," Willis says people should care about the team's work because it has technological spinoffs.

Onone hand, he said, this could be transformed into iPhone technology that allows iPhone users to conduct similar analyses, which haspotential implications for things such as environmental and water monitoring.

On the other hand, if NASA discovers extraterrestrial life, Willis said itcould use these analyses to determine whether that life is different from life on earth and to measure a "separate genesis event somewhere else."

'A big deal'

"I think it's a big deal for everyone because it really speaks about where we came from and why we're here," Willis said. "That seems like it's an impossible thing to think about and to study, but it's not."

Instead, the human species has reached the point where it can ask these "fundamental questions" about its origins, he said.

"And we can do it by doing these experiments in our own solar system looking for signs of life."

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