Narrator:        This is Science Today. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography are participating in the design of a life-detecting instrument for a mission to Mars in 2013. Jeffrey Bada says their instrument, called the Urey, will have the ability to probe for very low levels of bacteria.

Bada:  When we get to Mars, one of the things that will be unique about this mission is that it will be the first one that will drill into the subsurface. The one that's on the surface now can scrape down maybe a foot at best. The ExoMars Mission rover will have a drill that will drill down to over six feet. So you're going to get a core sample and that's really exciting because, for various theoretical reasons, we predict that, if you're going to have organic molecules preserved on Mars, they're going to be below about a meter. And once we get a subsurface sample, we will be the first instrument that's ever flown to any object in the solar system to do an analysis for amino acids.

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