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From the little Rover that could, which has endured 6 years of mission time on a planned two year mission, a brand new discovery.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has found new evidence preserved in rocks on Mars that suggests the planet could have supported ancient life, as well as new evidence in the Martian atmosphere that relates to the search for current life on the Red Planet. While not necessarily evidence of life itself, these findings are a good sign for future missions exploring the planet’s surface and subsurface.
The new findings – “tough” organic molecules in three-billion-year-old sedimentary rocks near the surface, as well as seasonal variations in the levels of methane in the atmosphere – appear in the June 8 edition of the journal Science.
Organic molecules contain carbon and hydrogen, and also may include oxygen, nitrogen and other elements. While commonly associated with life, organic molecules also can be created by non-biological processes and are not necessarily indicators of life.
“With these new findings, Mars is telling us to stay the course and keep searching for evidence of life,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, in Washington. “I’m confident that our ongoing and planned missions will unlock even more breathtaking discoveries on the Red Planet.”
“Curiosity has not determined the source of the organic molecules,” said Jen Eigenbrode of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who is lead author of one of the two new Science papers. “Whether it holds a record of ancient life, was food for life, or has existed in the absence of life, organic matter in Martian materials holds chemical clues to planetary conditions and processes.”
Although the surface of Mars is inhospitable today, there is clear evidence that in the distant past, the Martian climate allowed liquid water – an essential ingredient for life as we know it – to pool at the surface. Data from Curiosity reveal that billions of years ago, a water lake inside Gale Crater held all the ingredients necessary for life, including chemical building blocks and energy sources.
“The Martian surface is exposed to radiation from space. Both radiation and harsh chemicals break down organic matter,” said Eigenbrode. “Finding ancient organic molecules in the top five centimeters of rock that was deposited when Mars may have been habitable, bodes well for us to learn the story of organic molecules on Mars with future missions that will drill deeper.”
Thread ends here. Cut along dotted line.
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Abundant Methane in the air, and potentially in pockets below the surface, could allow an early plastics manufacturing making early colonization much easier.
Not really. There's no real economic motivation to go to Mars.
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I figured that. I'm arguing that the lack of the economic motivation renders almost any increase in ease moot. Even if moving to Mars was as easy as me moving cross-country, and living there was as cheap as living in Omaha, there's still nothing economically worth while to do there.
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TGLS wrote: ↑Sun Jun 17, 2018 4:52 pm
Even if moving to Mars was as easy as me moving cross-country, and living there was as cheap as living in Omaha, there's still nothing economically worth while to do there.
There's a fair number of folks in Omaha that may disagree. The third richest person in the world lives in Omaha. In a globalized and potentially interplanetized economy, where the primary and secondary sectors are diffused, and the tertiary sector is dominant, there is no major economic benefit to being tied to any place in particular.
So why not Mars? No matter what laws or treaties are in force now de jure, whoever gets there first is going to have a heck of an ownership claim, de facto. Even if it's not much more than rock, it's still trillions of dollars worth of living space and materials.
