An image from NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory shows a glowing hand stretching across the cosmos with its palm and fingers sculpted from the wreckage of a massive stellar explosion.
Using scientific instruments in novel ways is a common practice, but still results in significant new discoveries. But sometimes, it doesn’t happen so much as a “that’s funny” moment as an intentional new use of old equipment. A new paper from researchers that Imperial College London (ICL), PhD student Solomon Hirsch and his advisor Mark Sephton, shows how the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometers that have been a mainstay of Martian probes since the Viking era could be used to find extant life there.
