This brings.

Us.

To the.

Days.

Right.

After this.

It was.

Just you.

Were.

Thank you thank you so
much for that introduction and

thank you guys for coming.

Can you hear me on the back OK Raise
your hand if you can hear me OK So

what I want you to do is if you
ever cease to be able to hear me.

To wave because I'm
still talking I promise.

So.

As David said I've been here for
a short amount of time only a year and

a couple of months but
I really wanted to give you a feel for

what my group is doing where we're
headed and and what's going on

know what we do and
is who we use microfluidic approaches

to try to solve some of the big
questions of astrobiology and.

Many times I like to show a slide
asking what is astrobiology and

show pictures of all these
aliens from from and stuff.

But rather than do that I just want to ask
you what is the astrobiology What is that

word mean do you even have an answer.

Aliens in space and

that's how you would interpret this right
so we've got an alien down in the baby.

I moseyed be dissecting
that's what my group does.

No no no no no.

What we're doing is we're looking at
answering some of the big questions that

people have asked since we became people
and were interested in looking at their

life beyond Earth and how could we
possibly find hints that it exists and

detect it if it's there we're interested
in what are the limits of life on Earth.

And how does that pertain to some of
these other places that we could go and

we're also interested in how
does life began and evolve and

at the center of all of that is
microfluidics and our core technology

our programmable microfluidics that I'll
show you in some detail using microchip

rhesus with a laser induced fluorescence
detection and this is actually the same

wavelength of laser that we use and all
of our systems for a five minute meters.

To start you off it's easiest to.

To start off with the first question is
there life elsewhere in the solar system.

To give you a little
bit of perspective for

the type of challenge that we're dealing
with here this is a picture this is Earth.

Taken by the rover Spirit on Mars and
you blow it up and

you know you can see we're
a couple of pixels That's awesome.

Mars is the closest place to us on
Earth that might have ever hosted life.

The other really cool places out there in
the solar system the icy moons of Saturn

and Jupiter much much much further away.

And that's our solar system what
about all the other solar systems

we're not even going to talk about those
but this means that our instrumentation

has to be small energy efficient
compliance with the space and

Rover environment and fully automated and
that means that our chemistry.

Has to use low volumes to be
high speed highly sensitive and

use relatively simple chemistry.

And so our argument here.

Is that these micro fabricated bio
analysis systems meet these requirements

of spaceflight in a really unique and
powerful way now before I go any further

let's start off with the paradigm that
we use whenever we're looking to try to

figure out what's going on in the solar
system could there be life there or not.

Now if you look at a variety of chemical
species and the relative abundance.

That can give you some clues about the
organic chemistry that's taking place and

an extra terrestrial environment so

all the chemistry that life uses is
organic chemistry this is based on

carbon which are the things that we
don't even bother writing in and

these structures because
everything is covered in carbon.

And this type of chemistry exists without
life as well so if you look at for

example the Murchison meteorite that
has hundreds of different amino

acids which are these guys now I mean
acids come into varieties they have

two non super imposable mirror images.

And that gives.

The Mersin meteorite we see both hands.

On Earth all life on earth
has chosen one the left hand.

So we can look at is one
of those fingerprints for

an a statistical distribution that
could be associated with life

also the Murchison meteorite
has hundreds of amino acids.

And you predominately see short change
over longer species more branch chain

rather than linear species and this is due
to the radical chemistry that has formed

these things out there in interstellar
space on Earth we see twenty amino acids

and rich at the expense of all
the rest of them that are degraded so.

So.

Kind of looking for the statistical
distribution it's dependent upon what

the chemical processes are that's forming
those species versus in a statistical

district distribution which could
be the first tantalizing hent

that life has evolved in
an extraterrestrial location.

Now that we've determined that we're
not looking for a specific molecule but

rather a pattern of molecules Let's
talk about what molecules we're actually

looking for we're interested in
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons

I mentioned the Murchison meteorite
earlier this is a picture of it

this landed in Australia
sometime in the seventy's.

And.
It's got a very high fraction of these

poly seqlock aromatic hydrocarbons and
they're ubiquitous and interstellar space

means an amino acids that we're interested
in these are potentially biomarkers but

they're also ubiquitous in the solar
system we're interested in long

chain species these are not necessarily
ubiquitous in the solar system we probably

get them on Titan which is an example of
organic chemistry on a planetary scale

kind of like Earth it's very cool we will
talk about Titan the David asked me about

it and I'll tell you all
the stories that I have but

these would be potentially biomarkers
in many locations as well.

Now oxidizer like acids like acids
Polycarp excellent acids we might expect

to find these on Mars which has a highly
oxidizing chemistry and Steve inventor has

even proposed that this militant acid
here might be the last stable or

semi-stable species on Mars as if things
are oxidized all the way to carbon dioxide

so this is just an example of what
we're looking for and how do we do this

we use microchip capillary electrophoresis
with laser induced fluorescence detection

the laser induced fluorescence detection
means that we need something that is for

us and our species usually aren't so
we do some chemistry.

To make them fluorescent now how we how do
we do that chemistry have to use a micro

fabricated device because we want to
do all this small in a portable system.

So we have a microfluidic sample handling
system will show you how this works

using this we can drive a type of
species using this chemistry and

then separate and analyze using
micro-cap Alarie see here we've got

an example of off chip process he's done
completely by people with typewriters and

down here we've got the ownership process
don't completely buy the micro device

ninety nine percent similar.

Of course this doesn't operate in a vacuum
it needs external systems to drive it and

so we need a high voltage power
supplies to drive our C We need.

A bank of solar noise which aren't
really shown here to drive all of our

pneumatic operations on our chip.

We need the laser induced
fluorescence optics.

And the electronics to control everything.

Now.

In the interest of time considering how
long I've just been talking about this I'm

going to go super fast this
next slide there with me.

This is just the chemistry of how our
separations work we're using capillaries

own electrophoresis which just
separates things based on size and

charge by applying a potential And because
our glasses negatively charged we induce

electrons Modoc flow which pulls
everything to the detector

everything else has its own net
mobility except for unusual species and

that's what separates them we can use
across injector to inject sample N.

and then we've got a long separation
channel here so basically if you look at

how this works you inject by applying
potentials you get a little plug in and

as the plug goes down the column and
separates into species and then you can

detect by shining a laser the same colors
a laser in shining on it right now.

All of this has to happen inside of
a micro fabricated device so let me

walk you through our fabrication protocol
for one of these all glass devices and

actually while I do that
also pass around a divide.

This is not all glass this is
the one that they let me take out of

the lab because it bounces
instead of bricks.

It's got one of our programmable

programmable microfluidic architectures on
it which I'll show in another slide but

the idea here is we start off with a glass
wafer we usually use bore a float for

this other we're starting to get
into courts because you'll see.

Here we have to deposit a more is
probably silicon which is a hard mask

before we do photo resist
pattern deposition for

photo lithography develop
the way our silicon layer and

then do away with H. F. and then strip
off the photo resist in the silicon

After this we can drill holes and do a
thermal bonding to another glass layer and

that's how we get a fully encapsulated
glass channel now we can also put down.

A layer of P.D. a mess and

that flood flexible elastomer gasket
can give rise to structures like this

now what we've done here is we've
actually pattern the pedia mess layer but

you can imagine that we could do this
by patterning the glass as well and so

in this example we've got a featureless
glass layer we've got a pattern last

America layer here and we've got a fluidic
channel that has a discontinuity and

it has a stop so fluid can go
across now opposite of this we've

got a displacement chamber and so when
we apply a vacuum to that displacement

chamber that sucks this membrane
up which pulls open the gate and

lets fluid in and
not only does it let fluid go across but

that act of sucking that membrane
up draws fluid in from the nearest

open fluid reservoir so if we hook up
multiple of these valves in sequence and

actually wait them sequentially we
generate a little peristaltic pump.

That's if you had three of them.

I gather what happens when you
have a lot of them together.

And that would be.

This example what we've
got here is a rectilinear

A of these micro valves
that are all connected.

Out to each of the valves surrounding
it except for these guys which are stop

valves which control access in from
these fluidic reservoirs around

the outside.

Using this structure and
simply reprogramming the sequence

actuation of these valves we can draw
in fluid from one reservoir mix it

with fluid from here this is
the water reservoir and send it out.

We're bringing in fluid from here actually
mixing it with here and sending it

out to into the reservoir and so that's
the equivalent of labeling a blank sample

right now the processor has moved on and
it's mixing our sample with our die and

this is the equivalent of labeling the
sample and it shuttling it out here and

you can see in this valve you don't
get full mixing but by the time you've

shuttled it through multiple valves
you actually achieve full mixing and

those of you familiar with microfluidics
which is probably everyone in this room

you know that mixing is actually
relatively challenging to achieve

within these types of timeframes.

So the whole thing is going to go
through this process it can clean

the device you've seen it clean itself
a couple of times it'll mix sample with

standard to generate site sample
here it will label that and

shuttle it here and then it will label
the standard and shuttle it here and

those are the four analyses that
we need chemically in order to

obtain quantitative
compositional analysis.

This little video will keep chugging along
for the next minute and a half or so

the entire process takes a little
under three minutes and once.

We've done all of these reactions for
the various compound classes we get

very high fidelity with off
chip manual operations.

Along with cleaning in
between each device and so

the single device can do all of these
operations you just have to load things

into it a little differently and
program it correctly.

So this works great on
laboratory standards.

But we're not analyzing laboratory
standards we want to go into space and

analyze real samples.

We can't test it in space
necessarily because they

don't really let you fly until
you've proven that you can work so

we've tested it on a number of
samples that we can find on Earth that

are kind of similar to some of the things
we might see out there in space and so

one of these locations is the Rio Tinto
in Spain which is a highly

acidic river that has lots
of dissolved iron in it and

it's thought that you know if Mars was
ever warm and wet as it stopped being so

warm and wet you would see a lot of
places that looked like this with.

Just horrible salt concentrations and
everything that was cool about

the Rio Tinto is that we can go there and
we can see things living in it like

even though this is horribly nasty by our
standards there's still stuff that finds

a way to live in it and
if we wanted to do the chemistry to label

it means an amino acids in there this
would be the reaction that we would do.

And of course we would see the amino acid
signature of the extremophile population

in that river and we can do the same thing
other places like the geothermal region

called Bumpass hell in last a national
park in California where we can look for

carbon like acids and of course see
the extremophiles that live there

life finds a way just
about everywhere you go

if we went to the lava tube caves in
the Mojave desert we would see the.

What's going on here.

There you go OK well you
see the all the highs and

ketones associated with the booming
bat population and those kids.

And by the way that's my helmet.

Trying to get through one of
these very tight squeezes.

And for P.
ages we went to the Atacama desert but

the Atacama Desert has all kinds of stuff
as well and we've actually adequate

accurately if not precisely estimated
the age of the last major rain event and

the Atacama Desert.

Using the.

Remaining Anansi America access seven
you know acids and that does are.

Now we also tested on some things that are
very abiotic I showed you a bunch of stuff

where there's life is that me.

OK.

This is distracting me I'm sorry
if it's distracting you too.

So for those we're looking at
a radiated interstellar ice analogs and

this is supposed to be simulating
what's going on out there in space.

So there are there is a theory that you
know the earth went through a bombardment

period that burned off most of its
water because the earth got too hot for

that and so it lost a lot of its
water during that period and

that's why the outer solar system has
a lot of water and we don't because it's

kind of a distillation column where
the lighter stuff ended up out

here in the heavier stuff
ended up in the middle.

So where do all of Earth's oceans come
from of all that water was lost all

is thought maybe these
are commentary impacts from.

What stuff from the outside getting
spun around into the inside.

So it's really important to see what's
going on and that environment so

that we know what was being delivered to
the early Earth during that time and so

we kind of figured that whenever we did a.

They position of these various species
onto a silver puck and hit them with

simulated galactic cosmic radiation we
get amino acids we kind of knew that.

What we didn't expect was that we
would also get diet have tied.

And so what this could mean is that.

When life arose in the early
Earth it may have done so

at least in part by the biopolymers
of an exit in its origin and

this is one of the exciting things
that we can do just with the science.

But no I want to leave the science behind
and start talking about the engineering

for a little bit now if we've proposed
systems for a number of places we were

only Exo Mars rover as the Yuri instrument
package or at least as a part of

the package before we got the scope in two
thousand and nine which actually forced

me into early graduation we
proposed to the Mars twenty twenty.

Investigation we've got.

A technology demonstration option that
we've proposed as part of a Discovery

mission at one point and
we continue to try these these avenues but

what we've recently got funding for
is this a Larry load

development under Picasso funding
which is a NASA Rose's program.

To develop one of these systems
to go into Europa impactor and

so let's talk about that in a little more
detail but let's first look at Europa so

Europa is this moon of Jupiter it's
got a crust that is made entirely

of water ice and it is so cold there that
the water ice is as hard as granite but

neat that crust is
a liquid water ocean and

beneath that liquid water
ocean is a rocky core.

From what we can tell any where you get
direct contact of liquid water ocean

with rock on a planetary
scale you get a process

called serpentine ization where
the water subducts into the Rock.

So you get these interactions that oxidise
the rock that's a servant in ization type

reaction the rock heats up the stuff
the water heats up the rock

heats up because it's an accident reaction
the stuff in the water gets reduced and

it gets pushed back up through the surface
this is called a hydrothermal vent you

might be familiar with them having giant
six foot two worms those are magmatic

hydrothermal systems on the axis of
spreading zones on the earth these

don't necessarily have that they don't
necessarily have magnetic heating but

they do have these serpents
in ization heating systems.

Probably And we just got confirmation
with a Cassini mission flyby of

the plume of Enceladus that there may
be ongoing hydrothermal activity on and

sell it we think it may be happening when
you're open to what's cool about this is

that this gives us some sort
of chemical energy fuel

that could help support living systems so
now we're getting very excited

about Europa because not only do we think
that it might have those systems but

it's also got all this red
stuff on the surface where.

We're ice plates move and
we get affluent from

that subsurface ocean probably
spilling out on to the surface.

What's going on on Europa what's
making it read we all want to know so

badly the problem with Europa is hard
to land there you think about a landing

mission to Mars you know you
come in you burn up your he or

she had the atmosphere and then you
like launch a supersonic parachute and

that gives you most of the rest of the way
down before you inflate airbags and

bounce around on the surface or
lower yourself in the sky crane

which seems crazy but works we have proof.

So we came up with this crazy
idea what if we didn't.

Slow down on your Because it
doesn't have an atmosphere.

So you can slow down.

But in order to get to Europa.

The easier.

Way uses a home and transfer.

Which puts you there with a differential
Laski of about five kilometers per second.

So now our idea to just not slow
down sounds a little crazy.

But we proposed it to NASA and we said
well what we'll do is we'll build this

kinetic impactor who does have the service
will make a giant ice crater we'll

bury ourselves a couple of meters in the
ice we'll be able to get fresh eye samples

that haven't been completely or
radiated away by the magnetosphere of

Jupiter Wouldn't that be really cool
it's only fifty thousand G.'s after all.

And NASA said Sure here's
some money go for it and.

This is now what we've got to do is figure
out how to get our detection optics

stable enough that they can survive that
kind of an impact as their idea here is to

use indium bun bonding to permanently
weld these components together

we're also interested in integrating
an electro chemical sensor so

that we can get contact to
the measurements which could tell us about

salts which will tell us a lot
about what's going on on Europa.

We've got to figure out if we can make one
of these Micro Devices survive because I

told you as glass.

People tend to not think of glass as being
very strong I've got news on that one.

And also because we're using
these pneumatic valves

we found that just over pressurizing one
of these valves causes it to burst so

what if we put and
something a fluid to actuate it

that's not compressible What if
we used incompressible fluid and

that's how we ended up switching
to the hydraulics and of course

we also need to figure out how to get
the electronics to fit on this thing.

So let's start off with
the detection optics and

we'll just start with optics we
have this really old design.

It's actually not that old
it's two thousand and three.

Out of my Ph D.
advisors a group who where.

In order to do laser induced fluorescence
detection from one of these micro devices.

Basically just hooked up a laser.

With a photodiode here and a filter and

so you cut a hole in the filter your laser
can pass through the filter be focused

into a spot through this half ball
lens here a spot in your microchannel

fluorescents comes out in all directions
and it's captured by the half ball and

a collimated so that it comes down
linearly and goes through this filter and

so any directly reflected
laser light is cut off so

you can improve your sensitivity
because what you're looking for

is those longer wavelength fluorescents
light that comes through and

is then detected on this micro fabricated
photodiode that again has a hole and.

Has a hole in the middle.

So we thought we'd try
to build this again.

And the whole thing together but
because we're not just interested

in these small organic molecules
we're also interested in ph is

we thought we'd include a deal on the
other side of the way for so that we could

do some absorbance detection it turns out
this is generally a good idea anyway if

you look at all of the components involved
in a laser induced fluorescence detection

system this is pretty much the smallest
money can buy right now this is a custom

objective I mean this one is not this is
a cylinder that I drew in solid works but

it's the same size as a custom
objective that you can buy and

that's you know ten thousand dollars to
have fab this is the smallest spectrometer

that money can buy and this is
a laser diode from the top of this.

Laser pointer.

Fabricating the whole thing together
in a single stock we can actually cut

down on that size by many many times.

And so where we had on this well our
first objective was just to build

a breadboard system so that we can test
those optical components together and

this was the the first project a graduate
student that Duka and the group.

This was an early read word system and
what we can see is we've got

three dimensional translation
on these three stages

that lets us look at all different spots
of the micro device so we've got lots of

flexibility there we've got a filter cube
here that we can easily just pull out and

replace with something else if we want
to go to a different wavelength laser so

we can test lots of different systems this
way where is the laser the laser is here.

We've got a fiber optic going back to the
spectrometer from here a little turning

mirror here and this is a pretty
high numerical aperture objective so

that we can get pretty high sensitivity
on this system this is what this

is from looks like today now that it is
completely complete it's got this nice

black enclosure so that we can keep all
the stray layout you get a stage set up so

that we can accept various
Micro Devices and apply high voltage.

And.

Started putting in all kinds of new
things to make it even more sensitive.

Early data we can obtain optical
spectra with their spectrometer and

we can start averaging and
getting a signal response in time.

Limit of detection currently is
on the order of three animal or

which is on par with other systems we
haven't even really optimized the optical

stack yet so we're excited about this so
that means we're ready to go back and

start building these systems and testing
them using various components of that

breadboard system would also like to
get into a life for chemical detection.

Which would require depositing electrodes
on Chip this is a pretty early

design that we looked at turns out.

Electrodes built in this way won't work
exactly the way that we want them to so

we're going to going back
to the drawing board and

redoing how we would fabricate
some of these electrodes of course

the contactless conductivity is still good
and we might try that in the near future.

So that's just action is not the only
thing we need to do we also need to worry

about our valves and whether they'll
survive and one of the early things we saw

is that pneumatically actuated valves
burst on the over pressures so we need

to go to something hydraulically actuated
and the problem with the hydraulically

actuated valve is that you are not
assembling these in the working fluid so

you need some way to actually fill your
channel so everything has to have these.

And let an Al it channels
early device design here.

Was put together in.

And this red board microfluidic test bed.

That Thomas Cantrell research scientist
in my group built and we've started doing

a little bit of testing and what we've
really figured out is that a full P.T.

a mess structure is not
going to give you the.

Kind of rigidity that you need in order
to achieve actuation using a hydraulic

system and so we're going to have to
switch to glass Pad which we love P.D.

amassed because it's so
great for rapid prototyping and

just you can't prototype
everything with P.P.M. The.

Next thing we were kind of worried about
is how do these chips survive with age and

so I just wanted to show you a mission
design for the Cassini mission.

Launch in October one
thousand nine hundred seven.

Then we swing out.

Go around Venus come back swing around
Earth swing around Venus again go out to

Jupiter and then finally arrive at
Saturn in two thousand and four.

And.

The rule of thumb here is
if you can survive for

ten years and thermal cycling from.

Minus eighty to fifty degrees multiple
times you can probably survive this or

whatever your mission design.

It will be based on your relation between
Earth and Saturn at your time of launch.

But the good news was that we had some
really old Micro Devices from fabs in two

thousand and five so this is been
about ten years since these were made.

And so we could go and do at least
some preliminary testing to see

whether they would survive the ten
years that we would look at of course

these were not their most cycled from
minus eighty to sixty degrees Celcius

they were kept in my garage
in Southern California.

So it's not the perfect analog but
we can start to get into some of those

thermal cycling tests
after this of course.

Doesn't operate in a vacuum and it's
been ten years since the hardware that

was fabricated to operate it was built so

we had to build a new one this was
very first project was to design

manifold to operate it have it built and
there's the device assembled inside and

then start trying to open
these old valves and.

This is a little video of
that valve opening and so.

There when.

You can just barely see the change in
the reflection down here this is the valve

This is the shadow and so you can see
that shadow change when that valve

goes on the head and it opens up and
watch it one more time and

you should be able to see it right there.

So we started opening all
the valves one at a time.

And this video this valve
is already opening and

this one will open right there.

And so this kind of tells

that all of the criticisms that we've
been receiving in the literature

that our valves will seal permanently
shut upon any extended storage.

That criticism is completely unfounded and
we've even propagated that myth ourselves.

Our own team because we've never
actually done these experiments.

So this was actually a huge result.

But back to that the whole reason why
we're doing this is because we want to go

to Europa and land a giant lawn dart and
it surface at fifty thousand G.'s So

how do we actually do this well it turns
out that Sierra Lobo which is a company in

Ohio they have a giant air gun and
a magnetic capture system

that can simulate these
really high impacts.

So whenever we wrote this proposal
we kind of had this very alike and

wavy finite element analysis model
using like a solid block of courts and

like titanium to mount it in place and

said hey look yeah you know glass it
actually has a really high mechanical

strength and that's why you can build
really thin champagne flutes out of it and

you can build really thin champagne
flutes out of like cast iron.

So.

Look we're going to be fine right and

so on as a totally bought that now we
have to go back and commit ourselves.

So we started doing more hardcore
models and started increasing

the fidelity of our model to our actual
system and so here is the optical stack

on top of the glass wafer inside of this
mountain what we're seeing is of course

we're exceeding the mechanical strength
of glass at some of the edges and so

we need to build something that doesn't
have that problem as a collaborator

out of Texas Tech junk you can mean his
student started building designs for

a manifold that could How's the system.

And we started doing models for

that as well although I don't have
the results from the models here for

you today did go ahead and build the
system so this is about a solid chunk of

aluminum with just enough cut outs for
your device and optics looks like.

And so we said you know Well Zack and
Thomas they just got trained to do.

Use the machine shop over in physics here
why don't they build a version of this so

that we can go put it in the air gun and

catch it with the magnetic
capture system and

John Kerry says don't worry about it you
can just send the one we have built and

I'm like no that's actually you're like
functional test model that you want to

be perfect for what we're doing you don't
want to you don't want to do that and

think you know no it's all
aluminum you won't get hurt and

then fill out a serial Obo he's like.

We can hurt your aluminum.

So what we should be testing be very
very fun results to talk about.

But moving on so that I can talk about
some of the other ways that we use

microfluidics let's let's go to what
are the limits of life on Earth.

And so one of the projects that we're

working on now it's feldspar field
exploration in life detection sampling for

planetary national biological research.

It's nice that the description of our
project also matches a cool acronym

that matches a type of mineral that you
only get in Iceland because our fieldwork

are you only get in Iceland but
you get the nice Arctic feldspar there.

Because this is a project to go to Iceland
and the idea here is that we can do this

as an analogue of Mars because we've got
remote sensing data on Earth and on Mars

they can help us pick a field site just
like we would pick a landing site on Mars

and then once we get down close we can use
a unmanned aerial vehicle a little quad

copter just like we could use a Martian
helicopter that's being proposed as a.

Addendum on to the Mars twenty
twenty mission to help us narrow

down our field site
selection even more then.

Just like the Mars rovers
have things like Pan can

that help them pick where
they're going next and

they actually design pay and can to
be about I height with stereo vision.

This is the way geologist see the world
as if they wanted to be this little like

roving field geologist so
that they could pick the sites and so

we've got our actual field geologist
Alaina coming into the field with us and

so that's how we can mimic that and then
once we get even further down we've got

these field lab techniques
that we can use to analyze

the samples the same that you would do
with an Institute analysis suite and

that helps us pick out the samples that
we drag back to the laboratory for

our laboratory analyses.

Which is similar to sample return mission.

So every year we get to cycle this
again and see how well we did and

see see how representative
are these samples.

This was our team from last year.

And twenty fifteen.

And we.

Will go to a number of sites.

Last year we went to
some bought a house and.

Mail a FED of thunder down here we've got
a ham may end up here we've got North to

her on which is a brand new volcanic site
will be going to north to her on this year

and then we'll be going back to all
the sites and subsequent years.

Just to give you a little bit more of
an idea what these look like if you look

at them from Google Earth sometimes you
get good images of the basalt tough for

us that we're dealing with another
time to get good images of snow

depending on when
the satellite flew overhead.

And we're starting to get
good you wavy coverage and

that's going to be a major part
of the next coming trips this is

an example image from one of our you a few
things this is a an orange blanket that's

set down as a sizing marker to show
us how the how big things are.

Over here I believe is Vincent and
then Dave is over here and

that's one hundred meters apart that's
to give you an idea of the sampling that

we're looking at and so what we're
seeing is that all of our samples

look pretty much the same they were
all resurfaced by the same volcano.

And what happens is a volcano.

Shoots up and the ash.

Kind of cools off and
settles out everywhere and

that's called tougher and it's basalt
because that's the mineral and so we're

talking about the Celtic tougher and all
of the ash has about the same grain size.

And it's all the same mineral composition
as it came out of the same volcano at

the same time and
it just covers the entire region just like

this entire region has been covered
with it all up to a certain depth and so

the whole place has been catastrophic Lee
resurfaced by this geological event and

the idea is.

These two samples that are hundred meters
apart they look the exact same we would

land anywhere in this place and feel like
we were taking a representative area

of the region if we were landing on Mars.

But maybe they're not the same.

And how do you parameterize
how similar things are and

how different they are especially
if you're worried about looking at

the habitability of an environment like
we're so concerned about on Mars and so

we've gone and we've collected samples and
done the A.T.P. analysis and

so A.T.P. is this biomarker that.

Shows you kind of how active organisms
are in the soil and you know what

we see is that we're getting statistically
significant differences between samples

that are only ten centimeters apart these
are ten centimeters apart these two sides

are one metre apart these
sites are the ten metres

apart and so on and so forth.

So that's kind of disheartening.

Because it means that
the difference between detecting

the ancient life on Mars and
not to taking could be.

Two samples that look exactly the same and

you just went this way to
pick one up versus this way.

To pick it up.

So what does that mean it means we need
more samples a lot more samples and so

we're really trying to study this and
also just to figure out how quickly it

is biodiversity recover after one of these
catastrophic events and so what we're

seeing is that just the difference between
twenty thirteen and twenty fifteen if you

look at the orders of magnitude of the
scale bars here is a thousand luminescence

units and being correct this for
a relative number of sales cells but.

That's not necessarily the best correction
factor so we'll just leave it like this.

We're getting orders of magnitude more
activity in just a single year and

that's not using microchip stuff but
what we are interested in is kind of

using these same techniques not just
to look at the basaltic tougher which

is kind of our main focus right now but
to also look at fumaroles which are these

areas where super heated water comes up
through the surface you get these kind of

deposits each one of these little holes in
the ground is where steam is coming up and

this whole thing is liquid
that streaming down into this.

Sea straining down this way and from here.

I'm kind of lost on this map right now but
that's because I'm busy flying the quad

cutter and taking pictures of these
guys who are actually doing work and

we take some samples from here we get
a whole range of thermal gradients and

this is not from this funeral it's just
I like this picture of this funeral and

these are the samples that
we actually looked at.

We can see that we're
getting very different.

Amounts of organisms
depending on the organism.

And the various temperature
gradients that we're looking at so

this is a cyanobacteria that
we get kind of similar levels

until we get to the highest
temperature and then it drops off.

But that's not the only thing
that we're interested in doing

we're also interested in
using this new microfluidic.

Technique that.

We just realized could be used for
these extreme environments and so this is

this is I chip technology which has been
demonstrated for you know me as a fill in

areas like what dirt around Georgia and
you know the ocean in places like that but

it has never been applied to one of these
extreme environments the idea here is that

you just pick up dirt out
of out of your environment.

You shake it up with some water to kind of
pull cells out of it you inoculate those

into the little individual wells and one
of these micro devices and then you put

some of permeable membranes on either side
of those those little balls and plant it

back where you found it and that way
nutrients can flow in and waste products

can flow out and the natural environment
where the microbes are used to growing and

so you don't get a culture and bias
from dragging them back to the lab and

so you might be able to grow things
that you otherwise couldn't grow.

Where this gets super exciting is the fact
that we can now do this with their Viles.

And if you could get a pure
culture of a thermal file.

You could then correlate the genetics
with the Lipman's with the proteins and

maybe even start doing some protein
crystallography which would be.

Just incredibly exciting so this was
this was Thomas Cantrell's project and

we took this out to Iceland this last time
here's a picture of one of these devices

and whenever you look at the side up close
you can see a number of these little wells

that still have auger in them after being
soaked in one of these you know ninety

degree Ph to Hot Springs for
a week and a half.

Really excited about this we don't
have any hard data to show you yet but

we do have some indication that we
are getting thermo files actually.

Growing in these plugs
a small handful we don't yet

have confirmation whether that handful
is all together as a monoculture or

a handful this disperse.

But we're really excited about this.

And the last place that will go.

Will go through so
fast because I've got five minutes and

I'd like to give you guys some
time dancers ask some questions so

that I can answer them for you let's go
back to Europa real quick I've mentioned

these hydrothermal systems that you can
get because of the serpent in his Asian

reaction underneath that subsurface
ocean underneath the icy crust.

So this is now where we're trying to
focus because what's interesting is you

can precipitate out these little membranes
at these hydrothermal mounds that form

naturally and we see these with like
the last city system on earth but

the main thing that you're getting
there is carbonates because

the chemistry on earth has
changed from what it would be.

On an icy moon is an hour we're getting
away from from Earth we're looking at

these icy moons and we're interested in
seeing Can we duplicate these little.

Membranes that might be formed
in those situations and

this is kind of dating inspiration from
some work done by Mike Russell and Laurie

barge at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
where they grew these structures and

were able to generate some
iron sulfide membranes.

That were tantalizing close tantalizingly
close to the active site crystal

structures and some of our enzymes now
in the chemist will look at this and

they'll say that's no way
to do membrane science

you don't know the surface area of that
structure you don't know the thickness

there's no way you can do any
good science with that thing and

it's all because they tried to grow it
using turbulent flow so what do we do.

We say let's go out on the mike.

So we can use lemon our flow so we can get
away from those turbulent structures and

actually be able to grow controlled
membranes a little proof of concept

experiment here I called this preliminary
data when I pitched this project

to Max Dorn and said hey look there's
a membrane I didn't tell him that

this didn't really work very well or
very easily at all but

I was like yeah I totally did this
at J.P.L. it's easy you can do it.

And so he believed me and he ran off and
he built this P.D. a mess device.

And started growing these
beautiful membranes and

then I made the sounds that were easy it
was actually really hard there was a bunch

of steps that he had to
do to make this work.

But if you can control the flow rate very
well and control your chemistry you can

actually grow very regular membranes
on the micro scale at the junction of.

The laminar flow.

Between two fluids.

So moral of the story is one.

Max is graduating so if you're looking for
an excellent person to hire I would highly

recommend him and to never tell
a Georgia Tech undergrad that

something could possibly be impossible
because they just make it happen.

Wonderful people especially Max One
thing that we did find is that

after formation our membrane.

Changed color as we allowed it to oxidize
So this is another one of the benefits

of using the Micro Devices over
using that turbulent flow system.

And that is that we can take this device
we can build our membranes on it and

then we can take it down for
characterization without oxidizing and

changing the chemical structure that
membrane and so we can start to really do

good characterization experiments of
course we're not just interested in this

from like a what is the membrane chemistry
on one hundred ten will bend underneath

the subsurface ocean of an icy
moon of Saturn or Also interest.

That and like.

Hey we can now build a semi-permeable
in organic membrane and

shit anyone want to help
us build a fuel cell.

Sounds cool to me.

And so with that I'm going to
leave it there we get to do

all these cool explorations of these
these big questions but it's all because

we've got our our micro fabricated
core technology at the center and

it's also all because I have
a wonderful group this is the they were

originally team from exactly a year ago we
have since grown somewhat significantly

there are many people still not even
pictured and this like to think.

The state of Georgia and Georgia Tech for

funding NASA has been very generous to
us with the Picasso and a piece star

in the center for chemical evolution has
helped us with some work that we didn't

show here because it isn't even
tangentially related to microfluidics.

So there I will thank you guys for
coming and invite me questions you may

have.

Nothing.

Must have been boring.

So we're just now getting in to using
the I and we've been trying to stick with

P.M.S. type devices so that they would be
you know within the core structure for

an undergrad that's not in anything
related to my car fabrication.

But now that we've got grad students that
aren't taking classes any longer and

research scientists are planning to jump
in after our field work this summer.

And actually I think there's
a soft Of course they're saying.

And I don't know how
many people total in the.

Yes.

Somewhere in the like ten ish range
three of them will be our guys yeah.

So.

Yeah three of them will be from our group
as we try to start doing where the softer

legacy here.