This story is getting plenty of buzz and apparently we will have to
wait a couple of weeks for confirmation. The point is obviously that
some folks are excited. Most likely we have an unambiguous methane
signature.
Anyway it must be good news vis a vis the existence of biological
life on Mars. Otherwise we are looking at rocks and minerals we know
and understand or rocks and minerals we do not understand. Welcome
to prospecting.
Curiosity has been very productive and I expect plenty more. This is
a strongly disturbed area promising plenty of interesting geology.
Mars Mystery: Has
Curiosity Rover Made Big Discovery?
by Mike Wall,
SPACE.com Senior Writer
Date: 20 November 2012
NASA's Mars rover
Curiosity has apparently made a discovery "for the history
books," but we'll have to wait a few weeks to learn what the new
Red Planet find may be, media reports suggest.
The discovery was made
by Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, NPR reported
today (Nov. 20). SAM is the rover's onboard chemistry lab, and it's
capable of identifying organic compounds — the carbon-containing
building blocks of life as we know it.
SAM apparently spotted
something interesting in a soil sample Curiosity's huge robotic
arm delivered to the instrument recently.
"This data is
gonna be one for the history books," Curiosity chief scientist
John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, told NPR. "It's
looking really good."
The rover team won't
be ready to announce just what SAM found for several weeks, NPR
reported, as scientists want to check and double-check the results.
Indeed, Grotzinger confirmed to SPACE.com that the news will come out
at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, which takes
place Dec. 3-7 in San Francisco.
The $2.5 billion
Curiosity rover landed inside Mars' huge Gale Crater on Aug. 5,
kicking off a two-year mission to determine if Mars has ever been
capable of supporting microbial life.
The car-size robot carries 10 different instruments to aid in its
quest, but SAM is the rover's heart, taking up more than half of its
science payload by weight.
In addition to
analyzing soil samples, SAM also takes the measure of Red Planet air.
Many scientists are keen to see if Curiosity detects any methane,
which is produced by many lifeforms here on Earth. A SAM analysis of
Curiosity's first few sniffs found no definitive trace of the
gas in the Martian atmosphere, but the rover will keep
looking.
Curiosity began
driving again Friday (Nov. 16) after spending six weeks testing its
soil-scooping gear at a site called "Rocknest." The rover
will soon try out its rock-boring drill for the first time on the Red
Planet, scientists have said.
Mars Mystery:
Here’s What We Know
NASA says its
Curiosity rover has made a discovery on Mars, but isn't saying more.
Clues offer some educated guesses about what NASA's found.
By J. Nicholas Hoover
InformationWeekNovember 21, 2012 12:10 PM
Results of soil sample analysis by NASA's Curiosity rover may have
yielded a significant scientific discovery on Mars, possibly of
organic compounds, but until NASA makes a more detailed announcement
at a conference in early December, the public will have to sift
through available clues.
In the meantime,
Curiosity will take a break over the Thanksgiving holiday, during
which scientists will use the rover's camera to look for future
routes and targets for investigation.
"This data is one
for the history books," NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist
John Grotzinger recently told National Public Radio, while adding
that he could not divulge more until scientists had a better chance
to vet the data. Hypotheses have ranged from a discovery of complex
organic matter to chemicals indicating the presence of water.
According to
Grotzinger, NASA's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) was the tool that
facilitated the discovery. SAM is a hypersensitive set of three
instruments -- a quadrupole mass spectrometer, a gas
chromatograph and a tunable laser spectrometer -- that process and
analyze soil samples in search of compounds containing carbon and
other elements associated with life.
SAM is the largest
tool on Curiosity, weighing in at 88 pounds. The tool's mass
spectrometer separates compounds and elements by mass to help
scientists identify them, while the chromatograph vaporizes samples
and analyzes the resulting gasses, and the laser spectrometer
measures isotopes of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in gasses.
"Because these
compounds are essential to life as we know it, their relative
abundances will be an essential piece of information for evaluating
whether Mars could have supported life in the past or present,"
NASA says in an online description of SAM's mission online.
NASA sent SAM to Mars
with five specific goals, all of which aim to address questions about
habitability on Mars. These goals include surveying carbon sources on
Mars, searching for organic compounds, revealing the state of
isotopes on Mars that are important for life as we know it on Earth,
determining Mars' atmospheric composition and measuring other gases
in order to "better constrain models of atmospheric and climatic
evolution."
Curiosity recently
spent six weeks testing its soil sampling tools at a sand dune that
NASA named Rocknest. The $2.5 billion Curiosity is on a broader
two-year mission to investigate Mars' present or past habitability
after landing in August in the Red Planet's Gale Crater -- a site
that, according to NASA analysis of satellite imagery, was
historically covered with water.
NASA first used SAM's
soil sample tool with soil from Rocknest on November 9, and followed
that sampling with two days of analysis on the sample. In a statement
issued November 13, SAM principal investigator Paul Mahaffy indicated
that the sample yielded "good data," but did not tip his
hand as to what that data portended.
While the discovery of
organic compounds would be significant, as previous missions have not
found them on Mars, NASA officials have previously said in interviews
that they expect that Curiosity would find organic materials. The
presence of organics would not necessarily indicate past or present
presence of life on Mars: For example, organics can be found on
meteorites, and methane can be produced by abiotic processes.
NASA plans to announce
the news at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union,
which takes place December 3 to 7 in San Francisco. NASA scientists
have already used SAM to analyze Mars' atmosphere, finding little
evidence of methane in the atmosphere despite an earlier false alarm.
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