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Mars Robot May Destroy Life It Was Sent To Find
Hugh Pickens writes "New Scientist reports that instead of identifying chemicals that could point to life, NASA's robot explorers may have been toasting them by mistake. Even if Mars never had life, comets and asteroids that have struck the planet should have scattered at least some organic molecules over its surface but landers have failed to detect even minute quantities of organic compounds. Now scientists say they may have stumbled on something in the Martian soil that may have, in effect, been hiding the organics: a class of chemicals called perchlorates. At low temperatures, perchlorates are relatively harmless but when heated to hundreds of degrees Celsius perchlorates release a lot of oxygen, which tends to cause any nearby combustible material to burn. The Phoenix and Viking landers looked for organic molecules by heating soil samples to similarly high temperatures to evaporate them and analyse them in gas form. When Douglas Ming of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and colleagues tried heating organics and perchlorates like this on Earth, the resulting combustion left no trace of organics behind. "We haven't looked the right way," says Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center. Jeffrey Bada of the University of California, San Diego, agrees that a new approach is needed. He is leading work on a new instrument called Urey which will be able to detect organic material at concentrations as low as a few parts per trillion. The good news is that, although Urey heats its samples, it does so in water, so the organics cannot burn up."
Actually, yes. You can get an RSS feed for ANY user on Slashdot in their profile.
The test doesn't merely return a yes/no, but it lists which organic molecules it found. Some organic compounds don't last very long, so they would indicate life.
implies that it destroyed all life on the planet (the "life it was sent to find"). Instead, it sounds like its life detector merely destroys signs of life in the samples it's testing.
Why would we expect comets or asteroids to carry organics? Haven't they been around much longer than life?
Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Wouldn't you want to use an IR Spectrometer?
I'm actually somewhat surprised that we've never sent one up to Mars, given that you can find one in most research facilities today.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The only problem with that is that it's not a very rare process. Seems like every other week some scientist has looked somewhere odd you'd never suspect and has found organic chemistry happening there. All life (as we know it, Jim ;)) is organic chemistry, but not all organic chemistry is life.
Sounds like a major plot point of the old 60's movie "Robinson Crusoe on Mars", where the protagonist, a stranded astronaut, discovers that some rocks he found to put around his fire, release oxygen when heated (he discovers that just as he's running out of his bottled air). Sounds like it might be worth looking at as an oxygen source for colonies, if it produces enough O2 to be useful.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Before the launched the chemical detectors to Mars, they didn't have a real good idea what chemicals were present in the soil in order to develop the a realistic simulant.