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If we are looking for life on Mars, start underground. It's the exhortation of a leading researcher who recently led a paper on organic compounds on Mars.
Organic compounds containing carbon, hydrogen and other molecules such as nitrogen are common in the solar system. They are also sometimes an indication of life. But compounds, like life itself, are somewhat delicate. Radiations falling on the Martian surface could destroy all the organic substances that are found there. Jennifer Eigenbrode suggests that by digging a little more the researchers might find something interesting. "Mars is full of surprises," said Eigenbrode, an interdisciplinary astrobiologist at Goddard Space Flight Center at NASA in Maryland, in Seeker. "You could easily be fooled, but will there be any organic matter there?" Probably, will he tell us what we want to know [about life]? Maybe, something we n & # 39; Did not Thinking Ask?
In June, the Eigenbrode team published an article in the journal Science saying that NASA's Curiosity rover found organic molecules still preserved in 3 billion year old sedimentary rocks found at the base of Mount Sharp.This was not the first organic discovery of Curiosity, but it is the highest concentration of organic matter Curiosity discovered
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The discovery is remarkable given that Curiosity's landing site , Gale Crater, was once a lake that probably had all the necessary ingredients. life, "such as chemical building blocks and energy sources, according to a statement from NASA.
Because the Eigenbrode team found organic molecules in the first five centimeters (2 inches) from the Martian soil, the researchers suggest that the discovery showed that Mars could be livable.But the Mars of the old days is not the same as Mars today.
The surface Mars is probably not a favorable place for life today because it is cooked in radiation and lacks abundant water. Inside Mars, Eigenbrode suggests that micro-organisms below the surface would be shielded from radiation and would be closer to sources of water from which they could draw energy. [19659002] Mars was probably more livable in the distant past, because there is ample evidence of water flowing over its surface, such as fluvial formations or rocks, that have formed in aquatic environments. But as the atmosphere of Mars has thinned over the course of billions of years, there was not enough atmospheric pressure to keep the water flowing.
Why did the Martian atmosphere disappear? Some researchers suggest that it is because the steady stream of charged particles from the sun has eliminated carbon and other types of molecules in the atmosphere. Since Mars has no global magnetic field to deflect particles from the sun, they could crash directly into these molecules and knock them out in space.
The NASA spacecraft MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) is currently studying the atmospheric loss of Mars.
RELATED: How Mars went from hot and humid to cold and dry
The researchers said that organic matter found on Mars was particularly difficult. They were embedded in rocks 3.5 billion years old, with wind, water and changes on the surface of Mars, and were exposed only after being heated in an oven on board Curiosity.
Curiosity is not designed to probe the organic ones much further; its real mission is to look for habitable environments, not life itself. But future Mars missions will probe further. The Mars 2020 rover of the European Space Agency is designed to drill up to a depth of at least two meters and collect samples along the way.
Eigenbrode said that she can not wait to see if Mars 2020 finds organic matter.
Other researchers argue that life could be present on the surface of Mars. Mysterious entities called recurrent slope lineal tend to appear on the crater slopes, appearing as dark streaks during warm weather. Some measures suggest that RSLs include some kind of brackish water, while other researchers claim that water can come from the atmosphere. But if there is running water, the microbes can also be inside.
CONNECTION: March 2020 could return to the place where NASA's Spirit Rover wandered
Mars is just a place in the solar system where we detected organic substances. In late June, another research team using the Cbadini spacecraft announced finding complex organic compounds in a plume of water springing from Enceladus' iced moon.
In recent years, the Dawn spacecraft has discovered tar-like organic substances on the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres, and the Rosetta probe has detected organic compounds such as the amino acid glycine on Comet 67P / Churyumov-Gersimenko. Organic substances have even been found on Mercury, the planet closest to our sun.
Eigenbrode urged the space community to give priority to Mars in the search for organic substances. If we send humans with all our microbial systems out there, we warn, we need to know how our life and eventual Martian life will mix. "If we do not give that kind of due diligence to research," she said, "it could become embarrbading for astronauts."
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