NASA Still Won't Look For Existing Life on Mars (Update)
NASA Announces Mars 2020 Rover Payload
“The Mars 2020 mission will be based on the design of the highly successful Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, which landed almost two years ago, and currently is operating on Mars. The new rover will carry more sophisticated, upgraded hardware and new instruments to conduct geological assessments of the rover’s landing site, determine the potential habitability of the environment, and directly search for signs of ancient Martian life.”
NASA Hosts 3 p.m. EDT Teleconference with Mars 2020 Principal Investigators
Keith’s note: (sigh) NASA still does not have the imagination or inclination to search for signs of extant life on Mars. All they seem to be willing to do is see if it used to be there. At the rate that they are going it will be 20 years before they get up the nerve to try and answer the question.
Keith’s update: I asked the following question at the Mars 2020 Rover press event today. “Your press release says “determine the potential habitability of the environment, and directly search for signs of ancient Martian life.” Why isn’t NASA directly searching for signs of EXISTING LIFE on Mars? And I will ask my follow-up since the answer to this question is always “we don’t know how to look for life on Mars – yet”. – How are you going about the task of learing how to look for existing life on Mars, when will you have this capability and why is it that NASA was eager to search for existing life on Mars 40 years ago but is unwilling or unable to do so now?”
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.
K:
Agree with you. If life was ever on Mars, it is unlikely that it has gone extinct. Hard to find maybe, but not extinct.
I assume it’s because they have the funding allocated for their Curiosity Clone, so they’re going to use that versus a Mars mission they’ve got no money for. Still kind of sucks, but there’s some pretty heavy limitations on what a robotic rover can do anyways on Mars in terms of searching for life.
But you better believe NASA will look for extant life with instruments on Earth when the samples from Mars 2020 are returned.
sigh indeed. Why do we spend billions traversing an irradiated, arid, sun-cooked plain? Might as well look for life in the middle of the Sahara/Atacama.
It seems we should be exploring caves and sunken pits near volcanoes or wherever there may be some actual heat. God forbid we do anything sensible though. This is America after all…
Not that its being neglected, people are actively looking for life around seamounts and inhospital areas on Earth with quite some success, see Census of Marine Life project (shameless plug on my behalf), only that its not done by NASA, which is (or should be) about space exploration.
Peter means that the Mars missions are in the Martian equivalent of a barren desert, and that they should be looking at places on Mars that would be more conducive to life; Martian caves, Martian volcanoes, etc.
He’s clearly not saying that NASA should be looking for life on Earth.
My bad! It all make sense now. Time to get myself some coffee…
I agree with Peter that trawling the Martian desert is not the best way to find life.
I agree with your sentiments, but searching in very difficult high risk environments such as Martian volcanoes and caves just isn’t in the cards with the current levels of funding available to NASA. At current levels they are proposing a rover using the current technology over six years from now! God knows when the follow-on rovers will be. It’s taking 7-8 years between Rovers starting with Sojourner. I can do that math on the back of a napkin. Unless there’s a larger infusion of cash from the federal government for space exploration we will all be long gone before these questions are answered. I know, sometimes I bum myself out to.
Agreed on that. It’s all budget driven instead of common sense driven…
I think the bigger problem, which isn’t mentioned at all in your post, is that there isn’t consensus for what signs of life are, which makes looking for them really dang hard.
ask any two biologists to define what life is and you’ll get two different answers. so we can’t even agree what life IS, let alone agree on what its chemical signatures are. and if you can’t agree on that, there’s little point in designing an instrument to look for them.
so the question really is, should NASA be spending its money and time funding and building a “life detection” instrument with unclear design parameters and an uncertain chance of success?
I would say No.
Most likely the best way to determine if there is or ever was life on Mars is a sample return mission. there is so much more we can do with equipment here on Earth to study a sample than we could possibly do with the limited amount of miniaturized instruments we can pack on a rover on Mars.
Edit: other news stories about the 2020 rover instruments mention that the rover WILL carry a canister for storing a cache of samples – delightful news!
Studying samples on Earth is by far the most likely way to determine if there is or ever was life on Mars.
Given that there’s a theory that life spread from Mars to Earth, or Earth to Mars, that would mean the life on Mars would resemble Earthly extremophiles. Eliminating that wouldn’t eliminate all possible forms of life, but confirming it would be revolutionary and is very low hanging fruit when it comes to life search. “Look for what you know first”.
And as Keith said, 40 years ago people were willing to ask these questions, and do the tests on some of the most achingly primitive probes. Why can’t we today? There seems to be a deep cultural cringe in NASA against even the suggestion.
Viking had two life tests, and it turned out one had a tendency to false positives and the other had a tendency to false negatives. And they got a positive and negative respectfully. Seems pretty obvious to improve those tests to see which one was right.
If they discovered, say, Earth-like extremophiles, there would be an immediate suspicion of contamination. It wouldn’t actually answer the question. You need a baseline test on Mars.
the tests on the Viking landers were 1. not well designed and as a result 2. produced ambiguous results.
neither is good.
the thing you should realize is that in 40 years we haven’t come up with a definitive life detection test, in spite of many people working on just that.
it’s not a cringe away from. it’s an inability to (as yet) point to a specific chemical signature and say “if we see that, then there is life”
The researchers designing precisely those chemical tests would suggest otherwise. http://www.lpi.usra.edu/mee… (pdf)
As I said, it’s been 40 years. Shockingly, the science has actually advanced.
These and similar tests should be a priority, given how much prominence NASA gives to this in their PR on Mars missions.
“The new rover will carry more sophisticated, upgraded hardware and new instruments to […] directly search for signs of ancient Martian life.”
where in there does it say that NASA is cringing away from doing any type of life detection??
SOLID is a great idea, testing for responses to 450 antibodies. but it has a few weak points. it will work IF and ONLY IF Mars-based life turned out to be very, very similar to Earth-based life. if it’s different, it won’t detect it. it’s great for detecting life on Earth. we don’t know if it would detect life on Mars.
it’s also VERY sensitive to contamination. you’d need to be extremely rigorous in your sterilization methodology to show that you aren’t detecting contaminants from Earth.
on the plus side, it would easily show if any extant life on Mars would be a pathogen to humans.
i never said the science hasn’t advanced. it has, tremendously. but we still can’t say “we need to look for X chemical signature(s) to know that there is life”
[sigh] As I said, that’s the low hanging fruit. That’s the first thing you look for. Earth-like life.
Looking for something more abstract is stupid when you haven’t tested the most obvious hypothesis, which is also the easiest to test.
You look for Earth-like, carbon based, cellular, DNA/RNA/protein-wielding, extremophiles first. Eliminate that and you can move on to harder targets. Prove that and you’ve already answered the question. (And guaranteed the budget for the next 20 landers.)
that’s well and good, but then it needs to be packaged and marketed with its limitations well explained, otherwise a negative report would still look very bad.
and even if there is a detection, due to the inherent sensitivity to Earth life, you’d need to extremely rigorously demonstrate that the rover and the test equipment weren’t contaminated on Earth.
i’m not saying we shouldn’t send SOLID or an experiment like it to Mars – quite the contrary, i think it should be done. but the limitations of the experiment need to be understood.
You guys are both right. Finding some fossils might be easier and more convenient for announcing to the public, but it isn’t current life. 🙂 Start in the low lying areas near the equator because they had liquid water for the longer time, right?
A returned sample will be a very small part of the Martian environment, and we would still have the problem of testing it. In situ instruments are improving. We first have to design robots that can search more quickly and get a better idea where to look.
i agree. there are a number of very promising locations on Mars, like the Nili Fossae (where Methane appears to be coming from) that we absolutely need to study. however, rovers will always be limited. regardless of how impressive and sophisticated the 10 or so instruments you can put on a rover, it would still pale in comparison to the instruments available at even modest college geology and biology labs.
Forget Mars. Try lookin in Congress. Well at least for intelligent life.
The two bad words for the budget are search for life and sample return. This makes the mission a category V in planetary protection. If you want to sample interesting places, where life might still be (they are labelled special regions) the rover has to have the post sterilisation level of Viking for spores and microbes. If you are a mission to search for life the rover or at least the sample chain has to be close to sterile.
I see no chance to squeeze a category V rover mission into the Mars 2020 budget. Curiosity avoided the search for life thing only to stay in budget. They can detect life, if it is in the samples. But the special regions are off limits for Curiosity.
Hum, why not do the call for more budget. Put the majority of the budget on this card. It could be quiet interesting to see what results popup.
because if you bet the farm on finding life and do not find it, your budget becomes zero.
I did not say or intend to bet the farm. My idea is to call for more budget and put the majority of this budget, e.g. 70% for a period of time on a focused task, instead of spreading out the butter to thin. I think this focused effort will bring in more interesting and better results than are brought in with current the current Us space policy.
There are some pretty smart guys working for NASA. As someone else already said, if life is still there, it will very likely be very hard to find. In all likelihood, it will be deep underground. A robotic lander with this kind of capability would be difficult to engineer. I think the signs of past life (in long-evaporated lakes and such) would be far easier to find. So perhaps it isn’t a lack of imagination, but a realization of the limits of what we can do for the near future.
salient points. very well reasoned.
I agree…very well reasoned. Those investigation will probably have to wait for an extended human presence…and given the scientific literacy of the political class, and their inclination for consistent and appropriate funding of such projects; it may wait a very long time. Our grandchildren, or maybe Chinese grandchildren may know the answer.
Agree. When I read Keith’s update, I thought that’s great. You know that means they are probably trying to avoid people saying that they’ve already looked for life and it isn’t there since they didn’t find anything. Not finding anything doesn’t rule it out. Cautious scientists toward the public, bold in exploration and experimentation.
There is a way to search for unambiguous evidence of life on Mars that applies to both modern and ancient life, and allows the two to be distinguished. It was was developed at the Center for Astrobiology in Spain and was proposed to the 2020 rover call for instruments. This instrument, called the Signs of Life Detector, searches for biochemical compounds produced by biology. The only requirement for this instrument on the mission was delivery of sample. No instruments were selected that required sample delivery.
Sad that this was not included. We cannot know if there is/was life on Mars unless we start to ask – and take some stabs in the dark to do so. A simple look back at the history of Biology would show this to be consistent with how we made progress in understanding some very simple tenets of biology.
Interesting
http://www.sciencedaily.com…
I remember back in 1970s of Viking went to Mars, “Is there life, yes or no?” Answer was no and we didn’t go back for another 20 years. Maybe not make the “same mistake” whatever that may be? Of course there are other motivations, limitations, etc. and it gets really complicated for those not intimately involved.
Well, I guess we are wasting our time…..
http://www.channel3000.com/…
I think NASA is simply burned by Viking fiasco. This is why they are so careful and prolong it so much.
Viking showed that the results of a poorly designed experiment can bring your exploration programs to a screeching halt. being very careful and looking for answers to more specific questions, i.e. follow the water and determine past habitability, is better than betting the farm on a “life detection device” and getting your program cancelled.
What he said.
Was thinking the same thing, HD, but more in the context of ‘fear of failure’. Science is often advanced as much by failure as by success, and I never understood why those Viking experiments are regarded with so much derision. Seems like hindsight?
I don’t think they are regarded with derision, certainly not by the scientific community. but they -were- undertaken with no consideration for Martian surface composition and chemistry, and had lots of built-in assumptions and unknowns. I think NASA has done a lot of work to reduce those unknowns, and any future experiments need to either eliminate or spell out very clearly their underlying assumptions. for example, the SOLID experiment that is discussed in posts below, their major assumption is that the biochemistry of Mars life will be very Earth-like. if that assumption is wrong, they will not detect life, even if it is there.
I can’t but help wonder whether the search for ancient life on Mars is side-tracking us from the real prize – current and potentially complex life on Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. Imagine if we spend hundreds of billions of dollars and decades on robotic exploration of Mars, and come back with inconclusive results, or at best, indication of past microbial life – whilst at the same time there are complex life forms swimming in the oceans of outer-planet moons. Outer Planet exploration is delayed and denied funding whilst all our eggs are in the Mars basket. Certainly its more challenging to get a sophisticated probe to Europa and drop a robotic submarine under the ice, but the potential payoff could be much higher. Mars will always be there…but if we want to find life soon, I’d be investing in Outer Planet exploration.
“more challenging” is an understatement. it’s several orders of magnitude more difficult and would therefore be a boatload more expensive.
consider:
Europa is right in the middle of Jupiter’s most intense radiation belt – so even the most robustly shielded and sturdily designed of electronics would fail within weeks. the only hope for their survival is to get them several meters below the surface as fast as possible. even so, they’ll have to be shielded and radiation hardened to make it to the surface in the first place.
so this is no simple lander. it needs to land and burrow immediately – while still leaving an antenna on the surface to transmit back to Earth.
next it needs to bore down through dozens to hundreds of miles of ice (nobody knows exactly how thick the ice is). how are you going to do that?
then it needs to realize when it’s reached the ocean. presumably it will have to unplug itself from whatever cable is snaking its way back up to the surface to dive and explore the oceans, periodically making its way back to the unplug point to upload data to be sent back to Earth.
all this on its own. there’s no way that humans can command the lander / burrower / swimmer during any phase of its mission. you’ll need a very cleverly designed robot that can think for itself.
the biggest challenge is getting through the ice, while leaving a cable behind all the way back to the surface. everything else, we could probably pull off reasonably well today. that cable, however, can’t be very thin – it would just break, and it can’t be massively thick – it would be too heavy and bulky to to launch. this very, very long cable… it needs to be carried the entire mission, can’t break, and is by far the biggest and by far the weakest link in the chain of problems that such a mission would have to solve.
i haven’t even talked about our intrepid undersea explorer itself. it’ll be under tremendous pressures, miles and miles of ice and water, it must be designed to withstand that. and how is it powered? what instruments would it carry? where would you tell it to go and look for? again, it has to be very smart in order to be able to accomplish the entire mission on its own, etc…
this would be a monster mission. tens of billions of dollars, easily. it would probably be one of the few missions that would require a launcher on the scale of the SLS just to get the mass of the payload there.