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Mars Rover Finds Complex Chemicals But No Organic Compounds

Posted by samzenpus on from the plastic-not-included dept.

techtech writes in with the results from the first soil samples tested by the Curiosity rover. "Although NASA's Curiosity rover hasn't yet confirmed the detection of organic compounds on Mars, it's already seeing that the Red Planet's soil contains complex chemicals — including signs of an intriguing compound called perchlorate. The first soil sample analysis from Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars lab, or SAM, was the leadoff topic today at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting in San Francisco. The findings were eagerly awaited because of rumors that the Curiosity team was on the verge of announcing major findings — and although NASA tamped down expectations, the scientists said they were overjoyed with the first round of analysis."

8 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. NASA have nearly finished testing the new camera by Max_W · · Score: 5, Funny

    on Curiosity and are just about ready to go... http://imgur.com/VWcAU

    :o)

  2. Can't keep this up by mws1066 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    NASA can't keep up being the "boy who cried wolf." People will just stop listening if every little thing is "breakthrough" and something "earth-shattering!" My goodness.

    --
    Nothing is more dangerous than a programmer with a screwdriver.
    1. Re:Can't keep this up by GodInHell · · Score: 5, Insightful

      My assumption: It's one of those "if you know what you're talking about this is BIG new" stories I think. Means a lot to people who are deeply invested in the material, everyone else just stands around and says "so what does that mean?" Of course, a presentation aimed at an audience that is supposed to /know/ what they're talking about already assumes you know what it means.

    2. Re:Can't keep this up by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Please point out in that story where anyone who actually works for NASA used the phrases "earth-shattering," "earth-shaking," or even "breakthrough."

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    3. Re:Can't keep this up by crazyjj · · Score: 5, Informative

      The quote comes from rover lead John Grotzinger, in a recent NPR interview:

      Here are the relevant quotes from the interview:

      "We're getting data from SAM as we sit here and speak, and the data looks really interesting,"

      "The science team is busily chewing away on it as it comes down."

      "This data is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good."

      --
      What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
  3. ...aliens or not aliens? by stepdown · · Score: 5, Funny

    Reminds me of this recent SMBC comic.

  4. Re:NASA have nearly finished testing the new camer by wierd_w · · Score: 5, Informative

    Perchlorate is intriguing for a number of reasons that are tangental to the compound's intrinsic character.

    First, it is a potentially biologically useful compound as an oxygen source for single cellular respiration in autochemotrophs.

    Second, if concentrations are high enough, the salt lowers the melting point of water sufficiently that martian soil could be "moist" at sufficient depths.

    Also, the compound usually only forms in nature from UV irridation of aqueous saline solutions. A high abundance of the mineral is very suggestive of a very different mars from what we see now.

    Previous rovers have detected gypsum, and perchlorates at other locations. Additional samplings of perchlorates increases the probability that the mineral is very prevelent in the crust, which greatly increases the chances of finding microbiotic life.

    The fact that perchlorate salts are about as "interesting" as O2, salt, silicon dioxide, and other inorganic substances here on earth does not mean that they are uninteresting in an environment that is radically different from our own.

  5. Re:NASA have nearly finished testing the new camer by wierd_w · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It is a wicked oxydizer, and it does kill most terrestrial microbes almost instantly. (Its basically bleach.)

    However, the degree of lethality is deprendent on concentration of the perchlorate salt (my understanding was that it was under 1% of the sample, suggesting it was a low yeild, but omnipresent mineral), as a small qualtity would be tolerable to extremophiles, which is what you would expect in the extreme conditions on mars.

    Life on mars appears more and more to fall into a very narrow band of habitablility, like the photosynthetic soil microbes of antarctica, assuming it exists at all.

    Missions like this one give us a better understanding of martian environmental conditions, and allow us to make better guesses about what areas of mars might potentially harbor life.