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With a new NASA grant, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) will identify and characterize life and its biosignatures in frozen sand dunes to offer insight into how microbial life could form. The portable instrument Astronaut Raman for In situ resource utilization and Astrobiology (ARIA), developed by SwRI’s Dr. Charity Phillips-Lander, uses Raman spectroscopy to examine the mineralogy of samples and identify organic compounds present.