Posted on 06/07/2018 11:21:25 AM PDT by Simon Green
Day to day, it’s easy to lose sight of an astonishing fact: Since 2012, humankind has been driving a nuclear-powered sciencemobile the size of an SUV on another planet.
This engineering marvel, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, has revolutionized our understanding of the red planet. And thanks to the intrepid rover, we now know that ancient Mars had carbon-based compounds called organic molecules—key raw materials for life as we know it.
A new study published in Science on Thursday presents the first conclusive evidence for large organic molecules on the surface of Mars, a pursuit that began with NASA’s Viking landers in the 1970s. Earlier tests may have hinted at organics, but the presence of chlorine in martian dirt complicated those interpretations.
“When you work with something as crazy as a rover on Mars, with the most complex instrument ever sent to space, it seems like we’re doing what may have been perceived earlier as impossible,” says lead author Jennifer Eigenbrode, a biogeochemist at NASA Goddard. “I work with an amazing group of people on Mars, and we have discovered so much.”
Curiosity's latest data reveal that the watery lake that once filled Mars’s Gale Crater contained complex organic molecules about 3.5 billion years ago. Hints of them are still preserved in sulfur-spiked rocks derived from lake sediments. Sulfur may have helped protect the organics even when the rocks were exposed at the surface to radiation and bleach-like substances called perchlorates.
By themselves, the new results aren't evidence for ancient life on Mars; non-living processes could have yielded identical molecules. At a minimum, the study shows how traces of bygone martians could have survived for eons—if they existed at all—and it hints at where future rovers might look for them.
“This is an important finding,” says Samuel Kounaves, a Tufts University chemist and former lead scientist for NASA's Phoenix Mars lander. “There are locations, especially subsurface, where organic molecules are well-preserved.”
In addition to ancient carbon, Curiosity has caught whiffs of organics that exist on Mars today. The rover has periodically sniffed Mars’s atmosphere since it landed, and in late 2014, researchers using these data showed that methane—the simplest organic molecule—is present in Mars’s atmosphere.
Methane’s presence on Mars is puzzling, because it survives only a few hundred years at a time, which means that somehow, something on the red planet keeps replenishing it. “It’s a gas in the atmosphere of Mars that really shouldn’t be there," says NASA Jet Propulsion Lab scientist Chris Webster.
I'm all for exploring space and funding missions, but not when its central desire is to find life. There isn't any, and its a futile exercise that wastes millions of taxpayer dollars.
It sounds to my highly untrained ears that they’re going along the biological “fossil fuels” theory of the development of this stuff. Isn’t that still an unproven, somewhat controversial theory in nerd circles?
Rock Hudson blew up a bunch of earth built spaceships to prevent anyone going back.
“rover has periodically sniffed Mars’s atmosphere”
things that make you go hmmmm.
O M G.... So do they have a McDonald’s? Because I ain’t heading there until there is at least one McDonald’s and they’re going to need a lot more than ‘blocks’ to make it happen... I’m talking 100% beef burgers made of whole cows and parts there of.
There are scientists that are going to make us virtually immortal in the next few decades as well. How can you possibly be against medicine they ask.
Which leads to this question: If all the “building blocks” are there, why didn’t life begin on Mars? Could it be that life doesn’t just spontaneously happen?
And you know this....how?
What a wasted headline! From yesterday, a NASA bombshell. Sorry, yawn. Didn’t we really know about this already? A bombshell would be to tell us there are aliens out there, show us proof on Mars or the Moon, or floating by our space station. Otherwise, they are simply wasting taxpayer dollars trying to look relevant. They should have just announced what they found in a simple press release and get back to work.
It would be nice if they could admit they don’t know how life is built.
That they have no clue how “life’s building blocks” can in fact be described as life’s building blocks.
Doesn’t mean you’re not smart, just means you don’t know. Come on.
“There is actually a youtube video that makes the claim, based on the substances that have been found on mars, that it was wiped out by a nuclear war.”
________
Is such a thing even possible?
Yes it is!
That is the yet unanswered question. Maybe it did and it died out. Maybe the conditions never existed for those building blocks to be utilized.
They fart in our general direction!
Why does life have to be “as we know it”?
How arrogant are we to even think in the 100 BILLION GALAXIES estimated to exist in the cosmos, that the term “life” can only be applied if it conforms to our own makeup?
Nothing in the Tanakh states, or even implies, Earth is the only place where life exists.
Mars’ atmosphere is only about 0.6% of earth’s at about 0.09 psi. Despite what you saw on The Martian, you would need a full spacesuit to be outside and you could not patch a blown airlock with plastic sheeting and duct tape.
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