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Astrobiology

Active, Ancient Organic Chemistry on Mars

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
December 16, 2014
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Curiosity Finds Active, Ancient Organic Chemistry on Mars
“NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover has measured a tenfold spike in methane, an organic chemical, in the atmosphere around it and detected other organic molecules in a rock-powder sample collected by the robotic laboratory’s drill. “This temporary increase in methane — sharply up and then back down — tells us there must be some relatively localized source,” said Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Curiosity rover science team. “There are many possible sources, biological or non-biological, such as interaction of water and rock.”
NASA Still Won’t Look For Existing Life on Mars (Update)
Keith’s 31 July 2014 update: I obviously expected Jim Green to answer in the same cautious way that NASA has always answered this question – one I have asked again and again for the nearly 20 years. Instead, Green launched into a detailed description of all the things that the Mars 2020 rover could detect that have a connection with life. Much of what he said clearly referred to extant / existing life. Now THAT is cool. To clarify things I sent the following request to NASA PAO “Can the Mars 2020 rover detect extant/existing life on Mars? Will NASA be looking for extant/existing life on Mars?” Let’s see how they respond.
Keith’s 16 Dec 2014 update: NASA SMD’s Jim Green and NASA SMD PAO Dwayne Brown still refuse to respond to my original inquiry from July 2014.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

4 responses to “Active, Ancient Organic Chemistry on Mars”

  1. fcrary says:
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    This is really interesting, but it’s a bit hard to know what it means. So I’ll put in an advertisement for boring science.

    “Researchers used Curiosity’s onboard Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) laboratory a dozen times in a 20-month period to sniff methane in the atmosphere. During two of those months, in late 2013 and early 2014, four measurements averaged seven parts per billion. Before and after that, readings averaged only one-tenth that level.”

    It might, possibly, have been better to make unspectacular, and largely repetitive, measurements of methane abundance on a daily basis. Similar to, for example, studying a planet’s climate my making daily weather measurements. It’s nothing exciting, there is little chance any single measurement is going to result in a press release or front-page news coverage, and is therefore often criticized as second-rate science. But if you want to actually know where that methane came from, it would be nice to have more than a dozen, isolated points over a twenty month period.

  2. TheBrett says:
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    We’ll see on that methane. Nicholas Heavens over at the Planetary Society blog has a list of the supposed methane discoveries that have popped up before.

    • EtOH says:
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      Previous measurements have been remote, in-situ measurements like the one performed by curiosity tend to provide a more reliable standard of evidence. In addition, the spotty record of previous remote detections is consistent with the variable nature of detection by the TLS. As with its study of geology, one of the most important jobs of Curiosity is to ground truth things that we already “knew” from remote measurements. If Curiosity is still operating when ESA’s trace gas orbiter arrives at mars in 2016, this ability will be especially valuable for confirmation/calibration of that mission’s methane mapping efforts.