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The search for extraterrestrial life is one of the great motivators for exploring worlds beyond Earth. Ocean worlds, such as Europa and Enceladus, offer protected, potentially habitable environments that may be sampled from the surface through inclusions in thermally convected ice, pressure driven fluid through fractures, or deposition by active plumes, for example (Carr et al., 1998;Postberg et al., 2009;Quick et al., 2017). To prepare for such deep space missions to these icy worlds, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is developing the ocean worlds life surveyor (OWLS), an in-situ instrument suite capable of detecting multiple, independent biosignatures indicative of life. At the molecular scale, terrestrial life may be detected by the presence of key organic compounds such as metabolites and amino acids. However, as extant life may have resulted from a separate genesis, an in-situ instrument must be sensitive to as broad a spectrum of life-like molecules as possible. This challenging analytic goal must be achieved on an ice sample, using only the limited computation available to space missions, and in an autonomous fashion (