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This is a constant cycle. NASA publishes a press release announcing the publication of news on Mars at a press conference. Then the final announcement is enticing – but far from the real life discovery on current March.
This played recently, with the announcement last month of the discovery of ancient organic materials found on the surface, and methane fluctuations in the atmosphere on Mars. Methane is often produced by biological processes, so that seasonal releases to Mars could be a sign that something is constantly rebuilding an underground supply of this hydrocarbon
. And NASA will not announce the discovery of life on Mars anytime soon. This is not a disinterest on the part of the agency, but rather a simple fact: none of these missions had the ability to directly detect past or present life.
Life on Mars
Interplanetary Festival in Santa Fe. Los Alamos National Lab is steaming rocks for passersby. On the stage, Nina Lanza, a Los Alamos scientist, talks about Mars.
"There is methane in the atmosphere on Mars," she says, "and it's not just there constantly, it's small puffs that seem to be seasonal." The methane on Earth, she says, comes from volcanoes and life. "Methane does not last long, it lasts about a hundred years … so when we see methane on Mars, we know that something do it now. "
" Do not say that you heard from me that Lanza is part of the team behind ChemCam on the Curiosity rover, which is currently under development. explore the ancient lake bed of Gale Crater. There are two components in the system: a laser and a spectrometer. The laser vaporizes rock samples, while the spectrometer looks for revealing traces of certain elements in the vaporized remains.
"We can actually see the constituent atoms of molecules, so we can see, is there carbon here, is there hydrogen, is there phosphorus?" "We can see all these things," she said Popular Science after her panel.It has a practical acronym for this: CHyN OPS (pronounced "pulls"), or carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur Each of these elements has a part in life on Earth, but ChemCam can not see how each of these individual elements interact to form molecules. See also carbon, but can not tell if the two are paired or not.
This also means that ChemCam can only search for the most basic ingredients in life. It can not confirm whether the life exists or has existed on Mars, even though the environment surrounding Curiosity would have been perfect for for life at any given time.
"The crater of the storm is an environment that was absolutely habitable, we just did not know it was inhabited," says Lanza. It is unlikely – but not impossible – that there is anything today, but it could have been in the distant past.
Fortunately, NASA's capabilities on the planet are about to expand. The March 2020 rover will receive a brand new upgraded version of the ChemCam called SuperCam. While ChemCam can pick up items, SuperCam will pick up the main traces of molecules in its ultimate landing site. This means that he will be able to identify more complex organic compounds rather than individual elements. Using Laser Induced Decomposition Spectroscopy (LIBS), he will be able to obtain superficial information about rocks that he has not even vaporized yet.
Oh, and he will have a microphone.
"Not only are we going to listen to the Martians," Lanza jokes, "but you can actually get target information from the sounds that LIBS shockwaves produce."
"When you shoot the laser, it makes a "pew pew" version, makes a click sound, and this sound changes depending on what the material is and if you penetrate through a rock cladding, this will allow us to interpret our data even better, "she says.
NASA is not ESA and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, also collaborated on the ExoMars mission, half of which has already arrived on Mars, but the landing Schiaparelli failed. July 2020 launch. This rover will actually dig into the Martian surface, pick up samples, and test them for advanced bio-stop evidence just next to confirm the past life, but by taking more important steps than ever before. [20209002] March 2020 will collect samples of Martian surface, but it will store on board future recovery. NASA's past on Mars after the 2020 rover is not clear, but NASA aims to put humans on Mars in the 2030s. Once the human boots are on the ground, the confirmation past or present life could come faster – as Lanza says: "I'm always better geologist than Curiosity." Humans could operate a microscope or a lab and perform more advanced experiments. the rovers – which are currently limited in scope by a delay of six to 24 minutes per minute communications with the Earth.
There is, of course, another component of Mars' missions, far beyond rovers, landers and theoreticians. human explorers.
Eye in the Sky
Although curiosity may have been able to dig up the evidence of an ancient lake on the surface, much of the daunting task of finding water on Mars (again and again) was up to a fleet of a few orbiters. A robot may only be able to explore a tiny fraction of Mars in their lives, but orbits can give a global overview every day. At the present time, there are some Martian orbiters, but two of them do the visual recognition work: NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Express [19659002] "With something like MRO, we can not see anything smaller. the rovers on the surface really with the resolution of the cameras we have, "said Tanya Harrison, director of research at New State Space Initiative of Arizona State University in a DM Twitter. "So, if there were extraterrestrial cars or extraterrestrial buildings on the surface of Mars, we would certainly have seen them already."
Mars Express and MRO are both over 15 years old. A new orbiter with better capabilities might be able to get more details on methane plumes and maybe even see them directly. The HiRISE instrument – the eye of the MRO in the sky – is not sensitive enough to identify the origin of methane. For this, there should be a lot more methane released in the Martian atmosphere.
"MRO is not equipped to detect methane, but Mars Express has an instrument capable of detecting it by spectroscopy," Harrison says. "To see it visually, it would be necessary for the methane to be vented to a level similar to that of the fumaroles here on Earth – to think like the plumes that we see at the geysers or at the hot springs of Yellowstone or Iceland. . "
Mission treats the exploration of Mars as a fishing game. A lander or a rover pick up samples and launch them into orbit on a tiny rocket. The orbiter will then recover and store the Mars cartridges for possible return to Earth. This theoretical orbiter could provide an interesting opportunity to confirm life on Mars as never before with direct sampling.
"Using [an electron microscope] you can actually see structures that look like microbes, but we do not have them on Mars," Lanza says. "We have micro-managers, but they are not so high resolution, we can say that there is mineralogy, there is chemistry, there are organic molecules, we can build a very good circumstantial story and I think it's reasonable.But for an extraordinary claim, you need extraordinary evidence. "
Until that happens – do not believe the hype.
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