Curiosity Finds Conditions Once Suited for Ancient Life on Mars
“An analysis of a rock sample collected by NASA’s Curiosity rover shows ancient Mars could have supported living microbes. Scientists identified sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon — some of the key chemical ingredients for life — in the powder Curiosity drilled out of a sedimentary rock near an ancient stream bed in Gale Crater on the Red Planet last month. “A fundamental question for this mission is whether Mars could have supported a habitable environment,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “From what we know now, the answer is yes.”
It would not surprise me at all if ancient Mars had at least microbial life and maybe even stuff as far up the food chain as equivalents of moss, lichens and their associated ecosystems. The $100 million question is, of course, whether any have survived to the present day and, if so, in what form.
That was the big announcement?
Seriously! This is a new low for the NASA/JPL public affairs and mission information staff. Homer Simpson would be proud.
What are you talking about?
hi
Me thinks, that while this a long overdue confirmation of organics…it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. It is amazing that we had confirmation of complex organic chemistry (via Mass Spectrometer techinques) from Enceledus and Europa, from the Cassini probe, as well as Titan, from Galileo probe…before we have had similar confirmation from our close neighbor, Mars.
Can any of you folks more familiar with Planetary Science, and NASA’s missions, explain this rather unusual sequence/timing?
The fact that this is not a perchlorate saturated site with moderate pH is huge!
It’s not clear to me if they are making the chloromethane in the instrument or is that something that’s in the sample?
The perchlorates decompose and form oxygen and chlorine.
4Mg(ClO4)2 –> 2MgO + 2MgCl2 + 2Cl2 + 14O2
The mixture of oxygen and chlorine is very destructive at that temperatures and oxidizes most of the organics. A small part of the saturated hydrocarbons can react with the chlorine and form chloromethane, methylenechlorides and chloroform.
So: They produce it during heat up. The source for the chlorine is clear, but the source for the saturated hydrocarbons could be meteoritic material, MTBSTFA or organics from Mars. The chloromethane, methylenechlorides and chloroform at the end looks always the same it does not mater from were the carbon came from.
As much as I’ve been keeping my hopes up, let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is still only a maybe, could have, might have been situation. Short of aiming a camera at something moving of it’s own accord (no wind, marsquakes, etc.) there is no scientific procedure/measurement that I’m aware of that can definitely say, Yes, there is, or was, life at such and such a point on Mars. It’s still a game of proving that it wasn’t impossible, and in that respect we are certainly gaining ground. Things look much more promising than on previous Mars missions. This one observation is encouraging enough to make one think about what comes after MSL, assuming that Congress will fund further Mars missions. At some point, I think that only humans on site, using the same geological and biological techniques as are used on Earth, will be able to provide a reliable answer, but even if we send people there, it’s a big place to search, looking for the right sorts of strata and hoping to find fossils of plants, microbes or very small critters. It may be a very long time before we find any definite signs of life, if there are any to find.
shouldn’t they make Curiosity’s twin sister really clean and send her to a site with seasonal liquid water they suspect they’ve seen from orbit?
The actual chemicals in the samples are not clear from the initial report, except that sulfur is present in various oxidation states. Sending people to Mars will necessarily contaminate it with biogenic compounds, so any research on the presence of organics should probably be done before people go there. I agree with others that it would have made more sense just to make the announcement without the big buildup.
Curiosity struck scientific paydirt and the team deserves a lot of credit, not criticism.
I really don’t get the “what, this is all?” comments.
How do people think science is done? This is how it works, folks. If real science doesn’t excite you, stick to comic books.
Significant scientific discoveries are NOT finding Nessie or ET.
Science is done step by step, experiment by experiment, and the significant discoveries are not obvious from a tweet or newspaper headline.
I think some of these people if shown Rosalind Frankin’s 1953 “photograph 51,” the first X-ray diffraction image that led to the discovery of the structure of DNA would say “what, a fuzzy black and white picture of dots? Who cares?”
Watching too much Discovery Channel is my guess.
Jafafa:
I think you are missing the point. The science is definitely good and worthwhile. The point of the negative comments, such as my own, is the misleading way that NASA and JPL hype things way out of proportion to what they announce. They do this in almost every facet of their work, extrasolar planets being another example. If you read the details, it almost never matches the hype from the agency. It is good science, but not the ground shattering event that one is led to think it is from the releases. This has the “boy who cried wolf” effect on almost anything NASA puts out, and that does not help gain credibility for the agency.
What hype are you referring to?
We have known for some time that life on Mars was possible, so a press release using the words “life on Mars” had better be something truly exceptional, or stay away from using those words until you have the real nobel prize work to announce. That is really the only time going forward that you should use those words in relation to a Mars mission. As I said, this was good science, that helps to on a regional basis, strengthen the notion that Mars may not be a dead planet, but don’t use the life on Mars header again, please, until you have clear evidence of some kind that it did/does exist (if it did it probably still does in my opinion given the subsurface and episodic nature of the climate).
This IS exceptional.
If the phrase “life on Mars” cannot be used (and let’s be clear on the context here – the real phrase used is more like “discovery that effects the possibility of life on Mars..”
Anyway, if the phrase “life on Mars” cannot be used even in the context it has been in a headline until there is confirmation of life on Mars, be prepared to never see that headline in your lifetime.
Because even if Mars has loads of it, we are either many decades away from finding it or we’ll have to be astoundingly lucky.
Mars life if it exists will be hiding. We barely have the capability to scrape a bit into surface rocks at this point.
We aren’t going to be getting photos of fossils with MSL.
Fossil hunters on Earth can spend days without finding anything in particular.
There could be places on Mars teeming with the stuff deep beneath the surface and it still might not be found with absolute confirmation until scientists from the Mars Independent Republic’s national research lab looks in the right place.
You need to realize that the science and mission teams are under great pressure to generate results that can be fed to the public/congress. So while good science results are generally forthcoming, they will not light the fire of your typical non-scientist. This is what, in most cases, leads to some word smithing type to throw in some of the key words to elicit coverage from the media. For Mars, that key word is “life”. For extrasolar planets it is either “Earth-like” or “habitable”. After this happens enough, even congress catches on that this is hype. A friend of mine in the press will only cover these types of releases if his editor tells him he must, as he knows the big news is too dull for his average reader, that is it is just good science.
What you’re not getting is that there was no hype.
This IS a major discovery in our understanding of Mars.
It’s not NASA’s PR that is out of line, it’s the public’s understanding of what science is that is out of line.
This is big news, some of the biggest news to come out of Mars exploration.
We are not going to find bunnies scampering around.