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NASA scientists from the Ames Research Center in California traveled to the Atacama Desert in Chile, the driest place on the planet, to discover more of 39, indices on the habitability of Mars. On the contrary, researchers have been faced with discoveries that could destroy the hopes of UFO hunters around the world.
The arid landscape of the Atacama Desert most resembles that of the planet Mars. the hostile surface of Mars because of its drought and only a few milliliters of rain per decade.
Rather than discovering that microbial life can thrive in these extreme conditions, researchers have been confronted with the realization of arid plans of Atacama.
And the prospect of finding a microbial life on Mars is even worse because the red planet is between 100 and 1000 times drier than the driest region. But Mary Beth Wilhelm, an astrobiologist at Ames who co-published the findings this month in the journal Astrobiology, said the adverse results could still teach valuable lessons about Mars' past.
: "Before we go on Mars, we can use Atacama as a natural laboratory and, based on our findings, adjust our expectations for what we might find when we get there." 19659005 "Knowing the surface of Mars today could be too dry for life to grow, but traces of microbes can last for thousands of years helps us design better instruments not only to search the world. life on and under the surface of the planet, but to try to unravel the secrets of its distant past.On June 7 this year, NASA announced the discovery of organic materials in samples of Martian rocks drilled by the Curiosity Rover remote
Although the presence of the so-called "hard" molecules was not immediately identified present Life on Mars, the discovery was a monumental step towards the liberation of the ancient history of the planet.
At the time, Thomas Zurbuchen, the badociate administrator of NASA, said: "With these new discoveries, Mars tells us"
But NASA scientists now fear that the conditions on Mars are too hard for life to develop enough to spread the species.
In the new study, the scientists wrote, "Together, our results indicate minimal or no in situ microbial growth in the drier superficial soils of Atacama, and any metabolic activity is likely to occur. be basal for cellular repair and maintenance only.
"Our data add to a growing body of evidence that Atacama's driest surface soils represent a long-term habitability threshold."
"These results require constraints on the existing life potential on the surface of Mars, which is 100 to 1000 times more is regions in Atacama. "
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