AbstractThe search for life in new environments, e.g., Mars/Titan, will be scientifically challenging and have great engineering difficulties. In this paper the authors discuss an approach to field-testing methods relevant to three scientific thrusts in the detection of life and pre-biotic organics on other worlds. We describe how this can be accomplished through a series of field trials using a mobile aerial vehicle that is a proxy for the exploration approaches and instrument techniques necessary for the next stage of life detection on other planets. We do this by deploying a mobile organic laboratory on Earth to demonstrate the requisite techniques. We show how terrestrial field trials provide new insights on the colonization by life of fresh volcanic flows, and the competition between biotic and abiotic processes on a newly cooling piece of the Earth’s crust. This paper suggests that such work could be very effectively conducted on Hawaii, where the erupted lava is basaltic, an important crustal component for terrestrial planets. The presence of water is generally agreed to be a prerequisite for planetary habitability but the combination of basalt and water is chemically unstable at the temperatures to which basalt cools after eruption. The subsequent chemical reactions occur because the total energy of the products is lower than that of the precursor materials and on Earth biological processes result from organisms harvesting that difference in energy. For life processes to succeed they must out-compete the rate at which abiotic chemistry might accomplish the same tasks. Monitoring the rate at which chemical processes occur is therefore a life-detection approach. Biotic involvement in the rate of weathering of basalts is the test case for this new, generic life detection paradigm. This approach would be applicable to the periglacial zones of Mars, if liquid water were proven to be present there. We show that a 15m autonomous BLIMP could carry various instrument packages including camera, visible spectrometer, tunable diode laser spectrometer (TDLS) for gas and gas isotope analysis, gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer (GCMS). These could be calibrated followed by ground-truthing using field experiments in the interior of Meteor Crater in Arizona. This well understood system could then study the extreme environment of the still active volcanic caldera of Kilauea and the adjacent older lava flows. For Mars the BLIMP is a proxy for a lighter balloon or even a Martian Rover, which could carry a similar suite of instruments and take a similar set of measurements. For Titan, with its dense and high-molecular weight atmosphere calm winds and low gravity, a BLIMP will be the vehicle of choice. The experiments would be directly relevant. We discuss how a Titan BLIMP could search for organic compounds in the post-Cassini exploration of Titan.