More evidence of ancient organics found on Mars
NASA: Mars Has Ancient Organic Material, Mysterious Methane
“NASA’s Curiosity rover has found new evidence preserved in rocks on Mars that suggests the planet could have supported ancient life, as well as new evidence in the Martian atmosphere that relates to the search for current life on the Red Planet.”
“While not necessarily evidence of life itself, these findings are a good sign for future missions exploring the planet’s surface and subsurface.”
“The new findings – ‘tough’ organic molecules in three-billion-year-old sedimentary rocks near the surface, as well as seasonal variations in the levels of methane in the atmosphere – appear in the June 8 edition of the journal Science.”
The methane is the more interesting part of the news, since they’ve now definitively established that it exists and varies enormously by season. Supposedly the ESA orbiter sent to study it can narrow it down considerably as to whether it came from possible life or non-life sources.
The methane result may be difficult to interpret. As I understand it, Gale crater is deep enough to have its own microclimate. Circulation and transport of volatiles, in and out of the crater, isn’t trivial. That’s going to complicate understanding what the methane measurements mean.
Wouldn’t the ESA orbiter be surveying methane data planet-wide?
Sure. But there are always some complications and ambiguity interpreting orbital data. Turning the spectra into a profile of density as a function of altitude isn’t unambiguous and takes some assumptions. That’s not a major problem, but it really helps if you have an independent, local measurement. It’s a sanity check to make sure the assumptions are good and you’re inverting the orbital data correctly. Unfortunately, if your only local surface measurement is in an atypical location (a microclimate) it’s not nearly as useful.
All this fantastic science with a robotic instrument. No astronauts involved. This adds credence to the recent Pew poll.
Not only organics, but long lived surface water…..
Interestingly, one reason that the results of Viking were dismissed was because it’s experiment failed to find organics in the regolith. Looks like it’s time to rethink it again. But more and more it looks like Mars will be off limits to settlers for quite a while.
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