No wheres near enough resolution to see micro-organisms.
Posted on 11/21/2012 3:19:55 AM PST by djf
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has apparently made a discovery "for the history books," but we'll have to wait a few weeks to learn what the new Red Planet find may be, media reports suggest.
The discovery was made by Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, NPR reported today (Nov. 20). SAM is the rover's onboard chemistry lab, and it's capable of identifying organic compounds — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it.
SAM apparently spotted something interesting in a soil sample Curiosity's huge robotic arm delivered to the instrument recently.
"This data is gonna be one for the history books," Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, told NPR. "It's looking really good."
The rover team won't be ready to announce just what SAM found for several weeks, NPR reported, as scientists want to check and double-check the results. Indeed, Grotzinger confirmed to SPACE.com that the news will come out at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, which takes place Dec. 3-7 in San Francisco.
The $2.5 billion Curiosity rover landed inside Mars' huge Gale Crater on Aug. 5, kicking off a two-year mission to determine if Mars has ever been capable of supporting microbial life.
The car-size robot carries 10 different instruments to aid in its quest, but SAM is the rover's heart, taking up more than half of its science payload by weight.
In addition to analyzing soil samples, SAM also takes the measure of Red Planet air. Many scientists are keen to see if Curiosity detects any methane, which is produced by many lifeforms here on Earth. A SAM analysis of Curiosity's first few sniffs found no definitive trace of the gas in the Martian atmosphere, but the rover will keep looking.
Curiosity began driving again Friday (Nov. 16) after spending six weeks testing its soil-scooping gear at a site called "Rocknest." The rover will soon try out its rock-boring drill for the first time on the Red Planet, scientists have said.
You have to have a lightweight microscope capable of surviving launch atop a huge pile of high explosives, nearly a year in the searing radiation of deep space, and a scorching descent through Mars' atmosphere. And all that before having to send back images across a little radio antenna to a receiver that's between 35 and 250 million miles away. Just on the off chance that you'd see something more interesting than a tiny grain of dust.
Excellent!
Great post! :-)
Life died out due to the lack of CO2? ;-)
It discovered romney ballots from cuyahoga county
They’re lining up the muslims now to take credit for the discovery, whatever it is.
I KNOW, I KNOW!
obama’s birth certificate!
I have 2 Canon AE1’s with tons of lenses and accessories. Still use them!
Life sustained by arsenic comes to mind.
I’ve seen hi-res workups of the Patterson film.
It’s clearly a female.
It’s clearly not a human in a costume.
Pop top.
No, it was “get off my lawn.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5LUt-9AvNs
This one is pretty stabilized, and if you watch close, you can see the swinging breast, which, if this was a human female, would be about 2 inches above her belly button.
Note the arm length - almost to the knees. Humans simply don’t have arms like that.
And the shoulder muscles from the back are entirely different from a human female.
Except for the upright gait, this animal is built more like a mountain gorilla than a human, who is built more like Pan Troglodytes, or chimpanzee.
Clearly not a human female in a suit.
maybe they found oil, or coal
So much for “fossil fuels” and that lobby
The real birth certificate?
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