Chirality is an excellent indicator of life, but naturally occurring astrobiological (as well as terrestrial) samples nearly always exhibit massive depolarizing light scattering, which renders conventional polarimeters useless. For astrobiological applications, we instead consider a novel polarimeter originally developed for non-invasive human-glucose measurement. It involves deliberately rotating in time the plane of polarization of a linearly polarized beam and detecting the shift in the plane of the rotating linearly polarized component of the transmitted light from a chiral sample relative to the input polarization plane. We find that this polarimeter can operate in 3 orders of magnitude more depolarizing scattering than conventional polarimeters. Furthermore, it can also be designed to be lightweight, compact, and energy efficient.

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Chirality is an excellent indicator of life, but naturally occurring terrestrial and extra-terrestrial samples nearly always exhibit massive depolarizing light scattering (DLS). This problem bears a striking resemblance to that of developing a chirality-based non-invasive glucose monitor for diabetics. Both applications require a lightweight, compact, efficient, and robust polarimeter that can operate despite significant DLS. So for astrobiological applications, we developed a polarimeter that was inspired from a polarimetry technique previously investigated for non-invasive in-vivo glucose-sensing. Our polarimeter involves continuously rotating the plane of linear polarization of a laser beam to probe a sample with DLS, and analyzing its transmission with a fixed analyzer to obtain a sinusoidal voltage signal. We lock-in detect this signal using a reference signal from an analogous set up without any sample. With milk as a scatterer, we find that this polarimeter detects chirality in the presence of three orders of magnitude more DLS than conventional polarimeters. It can accurately measure 0.1° of polarization rotation in the presence of 15% milk.