Narrator: This is Science Today. One of the great questions in our society has been - are we alone? Are there other forms of life elsewhere in the solar system and the universe? The recent discovery of ice on Mars has added to the intrigue. Jeffrey Bada, a professor of marine chemistry at the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has received NASA funding for the flight plan and design of a life-probing instrument for a mission to Mars in five years.

Bada: We realized that the best compound to look for, if we were going to look for life, was amino acids. Amino acids are the things that make up protein in all life on Earth. We assumed, based on what we know about biology and how life arose on Earth, that proteins would probably also be important in life elsewhere if it's based on carbon. And so amino acids are attractive targets and with today's technology, using these little microchip-based devices, we can detect incredibly low amounts with amino acids.

Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.