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Mars NASA

NASA Mars Rover Finds Organic Matter in Ancient Lake Bed (theguardian.com) 148

NASA's veteran Curiosity rover has found complex organic matter buried and preserved in ancient sediments that formed a vast lake bed on Mars more than 3bn years ago. From a report: The discovery is the most compelling evidence yet that long before the planet became the parched world it is today, Martian lakes were a rich soup of carbon-based compounds that are necessary for life, at least as we know it. Researchers cannot tell how the organic material formed and so leave open the crucial question: are the compounds remnants of past organisms; the product of chemical reactions with rocks; or were they brought to Mars in comets or other falling debris that slammed into the surface? All look the same in the tests performed. But whatever the ultimate source of the material, if microbial life did find a foothold on Mars, the presence of organics meant it would not have gone hungry. "We know that on Earth microorganisms eat all sorts of organics. It's a valuable food source for them," said Jennifer Eigenbrode, a biogeochemist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The Curiosity rover also discovered that methane on the red planet changes with the seasons. The Verge: Where the methane is coming from is still a mystery, but scientists have some ideas, including that microbes may be the source of the gas. Researchers at NASA and other US universities analyzed five years' worth of methane measurements Curiosity took at Gale Crater, where the rover landed in 2012. Curiosity detected background levels of methane of about 0.4 parts per billion, which is a tiny amount. (In comparison, Earth's atmosphere has about 1,800 parts per billion of methane.) Those levels of methane, however, were found to range from 0.2 to about 0.7 parts per billion, with concentrations peaking near the end of the summer in the northern hemisphere, according to a study published today in Science. This seasonal cycle repeated through time and could come from an underground reservoir of methane, the study says. Whether that reservoir is a sign that there is or was life on Mars, however, is impossible to say for now.
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NASA Mars Rover Finds Organic Matter in Ancient Lake Bed

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  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Thursday June 07, 2018 @01:12PM (#56744238)

    ... of complex life on Mars. Of the sort that screams: "The great filter is still ahead of you guys and it's coming for you too!"

    Ooooh, creeeepy. That would have me scared.

    • by Quirkz ( 1206400 )

      Seems unlikely at this point. For the great filter to be ahead of us, they'd need evidence of complex civilizations that outstripped our current one and then collapsed. From all indications, we greatly surpassed Mars. Any new threats are of our own making, or come from the beyond.

      • by quenda ( 644621 )

        Seems unlikely at this point. For the great filter to be ahead of us, they'd need evidence of complex civilizations

        No, anything that eliminates the best candidate for the Great Filter being behind us (ie the development of complex life), increases the chance that the Great filter is ahead of us.

        But there is no point worrying, as there is nothing we can do. If there was even a 1% chance of our greatest minds finding a way around a filter, it would not be the great filter.

        The discovery of simple life would be minor bad news. Many scientists expect that simple life is common in the galaxy.
        But it took a billion year

    • You mean like the cretaceous bottleneck?
    • by Calydor ( 739835 )

      Looking at your sig, the names of languages (eg. English and German) are capitalized in English. Not ALL words capitalized in German are lowercase in other languages. ;-)

    • by BitterOak ( 537666 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:27PM (#56744798)
      Yeah, the headline is a bit misleading. It would have been better to say, "organic compounds" or "organic chemicals" were found on Mars. The phrase "organic matter" is somewhat ambiguous and is suggestive of decomposing Martian bodies.
      • Chemists know what organic compound means (somewhat), but to a significant percentage of the population organic means "natural". Heck even chemists can't agree on a definition of "organic compound". Maybe "carbon" would have been more specific and therefore more clear, if that's what is meant.

        Of course, a certain percentage of Slashdot readers would think "carbon" means "omg Martians were burning fossil fuels and destroyed their planet by global warming", but I guess no wording is completely idiot proof.

      • by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

        In fact, it is just a roundabout way of saying that no pesticide was found on mars.

  • Neat!
  • Car remains? (Score:4, Informative)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @01:31PM (#56744344)
    Are there the remains of a red Tesla roadster scattered around the area?
    • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @01:35PM (#56744382)

      Are there the remains of a red Tesla roadster scattered around the area?

      Was Mars avoidance programmed into the Autopilot braking subroutines?

      • by NewtonsLaw ( 409638 ) on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:34PM (#56744872)

        "Was Mars avoidance programmed into the Autopilot braking subroutines?"

        Yes, but a software update is required to ensure that it will brake in the required distance :-)

        • "Was Mars avoidance programmed into the Autopilot braking subroutines?"

          Yes, but a software update is required to ensure that it will brake in the required distance :-)

          I'd like to point out that the name "autopilot" does not relieve the vehicle's operator from duty as he or she should be in command of the vehicle at all times. Any suggestion that this name "autopilot" leads to complacency or that it makes people assume the vehicle is completely autonomous and road worthy are against our terms of service. There are many flashy flashy alerts to say that the person should be in control, not Tesla software. Crucially the user must note that software updates and scheduling of

  • This is an important find, and so far as I'm concerned totally validates the effort that's gone into exploring Mars up to this point, but frankly I was hoping they were going to announce they'd found actual lifeforms, or solid evidence lifeforms once existed there. This is a big step towards that but there's too much wiggle-room to conclude Mars has or once had life of any kind on it. More work to do yet I guess! Progress is progress though.
    • Problem is: you canâ(TM)t prove that Mars never had life. Even if we search until mankind has become extinct: if we didnâ(TM)t find substantial proof that never means Mars doesnâ(TM)t or didnâ(TM)t have life.

    • That's pretty technically difficult, even on Earth it was only relatively recently that we discovered how common archaea are since they generally can't be cultured. We'll probably need to bring samples back or send very well equipped humans there before we can definitively state that we've found Martian life.
      • You don't need to find the life. NASA engineers established, back in the 60s, that it alters the geology and chemistry of the planet. If you find a discontinuity in the geology for which there's no non-living mechanism, you have established there was life.

        Life necessarily creates an n-way dynamic equilibrium at a moderate energy state. You always get two or more streams of molecules that cannot coexist but whose ratio is fluctuating around a non-zero value. Non-life always tends to a static equilibrium of t

  • Cue David Bowie! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MAXOMENOS ( 9802 ) <mike&mikesmithfororegon,com> on Thursday June 07, 2018 @01:54PM (#56744494) Homepage
    Life On Mars [youtube.com] never gets old.
  • organic matter = carbon, not proof of life at all as carbon and methane are all over without life too
    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by suman28 ( 558822 )
      quit it!
      Those scientists need the story to hold, so that they can get paid and remain on the job for 30 or 40 years.
      You telling the truth will make them jobless. Is that what you want?
    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      The question is "What does 'complex organic matter' mean?" It's not just carbon, and you wouldn't find methane in a lake bed. It's a gas at Mars STP.

  • Rover found genetic material, methane in sedimentary material.

    Sounds like the sewer outside the average slashdotter's house!

  • They found what's left of Matt Damon's potato garden
  • by Anonymous Coward

    It must be too much to expect /. to actually get into the specifics of what was measured, since that would be far, far too "technical" and above the heads of 99.9% of /. readers. Martian methane isn't news. Other organic compounds isn't news. So, the stupid (literally) post failed to state what the news actually was. Epic fail. I guess I need to go elsewhere to get content worth reading.

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Well, one article linked above seemed to indicate that about all the determined was the melting, or possibly sublimation, temperature and possibly the mass. Some of the stuff they tested for "does it contain sulfur?", It also sounded like they tested, somehow, for carbon rings. This is wildly out of my area of expertise, and someone whose organic chem was a few decades closer than mine could probably have gotten a lot more out of it.

  • From TFA:

    When the samples reached 500 to 820C, the rover’s instruments detected a range of so-called aromatic, aliphatic and thiophenic vapours. The science team believes these are breakdown products of even larger organic molecules, similar to those found in coal, which were trapped in the Martian rocks in the distant past.

    Clearly we need to create a permanent base of Mars to stake our claim to Martian coal!

  • by Anonymous Coward

    "When the samples [were heated to] 500 to 820C, the rover’s instruments detected a range of so-called aromatic, aliphatic and thiophenic vapours. The science team believes these are breakdown products of even larger organic molecules, similar to those found in coal, which were trapped in the Martian rocks in the distant past."
    Article also mentions sample was from "mere centimeters" under surface. For decades there was debate about the origin of coal and oil (petroleum) on Earth. One camp said it (or a

  • Perhaps the next thing, is to send up molecular biology analysis equipment like a DNA sequencer with all of the appropriate sample prep.

    This seems like a perfect application for "shotgun sequencing" to digitally reconstruct the organisms, assuming that other simpler detection methods check out for amino acids, etc.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • They found organic molecules, not DNA. The headline is wrong.
      • And methane... but you know, there are huge clouds of methane in the universe, it's not like it's all created by biological processes. "Organic" as in "organic chemistry" doesn't necessary imply "produced by living organisms".
      • Foolish of me, I got too excited. I read that you cant extract DNA from from fossil fuel for example. https://www.reddit.com/r/asksc... [reddit.com]

        It looks like they don't have the instrumentation to detect complex organic molecules - What kind of instruments would we need to detect this?What are the limits of detection, and what can you put on a rover? Would nMRI work? FTIR..? I'd love to read from the perspective of an analytical chemist.

        " . When the samples reached 500 to 820C, the rover’s instrume

  • they discovered organic mater ... next step a drilling rig.
  • We all remember NASA's best announcement of findings on Mars: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap0... [nasa.gov]
  • I spoke to a biochemist from my work about the limits of detection for complex molecules, and me mentioned that you need something like a mass spectrometer to detect mass, and a gas chromatography to detect structure. I just read that curiosity rover has this, but am unsure of it's limitations.

    What are the limits to detection in terms of molecule complexity? Any how can you unambiguously tell that they were generated from life?

    Could polarimetry be used to detect handedness? I've read that over tim

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