Life detection with the Enceladus Orbiting Sequencer

Widespread organic synthesis in the early solar nebula led to delivery of similar complex organics, probably including nucleobases or their precursors, to many potentially habitable locations such as Mars, Europa, and Enceladus. If life evolved beyond Earth, the presence of these organics could have biased life towards utilization of informational polymers (IPs) like RNA or DNA. Given this, searching for and sequencing any such IPs offers a definitive, information rich, approach to life detection that complements existing methods. Saturn's icy moon Enceladus offers possibly the best conditions in the solar system to find extant life beyond Earth. Recent discovery of a salt-water plume likely derived from sub-surface liquid reservoirs provides direct access to this potentially habitable environment. We describe an instrument concept, the Enceladus Orbiting Sequencer (EOS), specifically geared to search for life on Enceladus. As a payload on board an Enceladus flyby or orbiter mission, EOS would capture ice grains from the plume, then concentrate and characterize any long charged polymers using nanopore or semiconductor sequencing. Searching for life on Enceladus could give us our first glimpse of a second genesis and test whether biochemistry is varied or universal.