Evaluating Biosignatures for Life Detection

Pohorille, Andrew

关键词: ABIOGENESIS;    AEROSPACE ENVIRONMENTS;    AGGREGATES;    BAYES THEOREM;    BIOMARKERS;    EXOBIOLOGY;    HYPOTHESES;    KNOWLEDGE BASED SYSTEMS;    LIFE DETECTORS;    PROBABILITY THEORY;    SIGNAL DETECTION;    SIGNAL TO NOISE RATIOS;    SYNTHESIS (CHEMISTRY);   

RP-ID  :  ARC-E-DAA-TN70057

学科分类：生物科学（综合）

美国|英语

来源: NASA Technical Reports Server

【 摘 要 】

The goal here is to develop a conceptual framework for evaluating the ability of different biosignatures to provide evidence for the presence of life in planned missions or observational studies. The focus is on intrinsic characteristics of biosignatures in a given space environment rather than on their detection, which depends on the current state of technology. Suitable evaluation procedures are based on an extensive body of previous work on related problems in which different options are evaluated to make decisions in business, engineering, medical fields and social or political arena. In these cases, three approaches have proven to be particularly useful. Two of them, signal detection theory (SDT) and Bayesian hypothesis testing are based on probabilities. The third approach, multi-attribute utility (MAU) is based on utility theory.