NASA May Have Discovered and Then Destroyed Organics on Mars in 1976 (space.com) 70
An anonymous reader shares a report: Over 40 years ago, a NASA mission may have accidentally destroyed what would have been the first discovery of organic molecules on Mars, according to a report from New Scientist. Recently, NASA caused quite a commotion when it announced that its Curiosity rover discovered organic molecules -- which make up life as we know it -- on Mars. This followed the first confirmation of organic molecules on Mars in 2014. But because small, carbon-rich meteorites so frequently pelt the Red Planet, scientists have suspected for decades that organics exist on Mars.
But researchers were stunned in 1976, when NASA sent two Viking landers to Mars to search for organics for the first time and found absolutely none. Scientists didn't know what to make of the Viking findings -- how could there be no organics on Mars? "It was just completely unexpected and inconsistent with what we knew," Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, told New Scientist.
But researchers were stunned in 1976, when NASA sent two Viking landers to Mars to search for organics for the first time and found absolutely none. Scientists didn't know what to make of the Viking findings -- how could there be no organics on Mars? "It was just completely unexpected and inconsistent with what we knew," Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, told New Scientist.
Re:wait what (Score:5, Funny)
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Please mention how the organics were destroyed (Score:5, Insightful)
Kind suggestion for Slashdot editors: please mention how the organics were destroyed in the lede. You say they were destroyed but you don't say how.
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post to undo accidental moderation
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This story was generated automatically, obviously. AI’s not perfect yet. Give it some time.
So we are using AI to find life now? Interesting...
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Re:Please mention how the organics were destroyed (Score:5, Funny)
Kind suggestion for Slashdot editors: please mention how the organics were destroyed in the lede. You say they were destroyed but you don't say how.
In addition to organics, NASA also expected any landers arriving at Mars to encounter hostile aliens armed with ray guns. In order to counter this threat, they equipped the landers with short range molecular disruptors.
Unfortunately, even though no aliens immediately appeared, a software glitch activated the disruptors. This disintegrated most of the matter within 10 meters of the landers, including the soil samples.
Re: Please mention how the organics were destroyed (Score:5, Informative)
The viking's spectrometer had to heat the soil. We more recently discovered perchlorate in the mars soil. Its speculated the heat ignited the perchlorate and burned away the organic material. Viking did find chlorobenzene in the soil, which would support that theory, but is not conclusive.
You can try it at home (Score:4, Informative)
At 2300 degrees, steel becomes liquid. At 1500 degrees, structural steel is about the consistency (and strength) of plastic. You can try it yourself. You can get a 1/4 steel rod and propane torch at home depot. Get it the steel glowing bright red (1500) and you'll find you can easily bend it with finger pressure.
https://youtu.be/FzF1KySHmUA [youtu.be]
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How come there were ZERO changes to the building code afterwards though?
There were 23 building code changes (Score:2)
There were 23 changes to building codes based on lessons learned from 9-11.
https://www.buildings.com/arti... [buildings.com]
https://www.fireengineering.co... [fireengineering.com]
Re:You can try it at home (Score:4, Funny)
you'll find you can easily bend it with finger pressure
Though be aware that each finger is single-use for this test.
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This was a far more elegantly worded comment on the parent than mine was going to be - nice work, sir :)
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So what about the pools of molten steel at ground zero?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I'm glad you asked (iron age humans) (Score:2)
Thanks for asking. There are a couple of important effects at play, some of which you can try yourself at home, or may have already seen.
You may have seen an aluminum can or glass bottle melt in a campfire or bonfire. Glass melts at about 2,700F. A wood fire can reach temperatures of 3,590F, especially with a structure providing vertical airflow. About 2,000F is more typical for a campfire, but I've seen glass melt in a wood fire and you may have as well. Iron catches on fire, not just burns, at about 15
PS I forgot the iron age, steel over 1,000 years a (Score:2)
I forgot something. You may know steel is mostly iron.
You may know that 2,00-3,000 years ago people were smelting (and melting) iron.
You may not know they were making steel in China over 2,000 years ago. Molten steel. Do you think they used C4 in China 2,000 years ago. Of course not. Melting steel just isn't all that hard to do. Especially if you don't mind destroying the container it's in. I've melted various metals to liquid and my problem has always been breaking the container. The melting itself isn't t
PPS how I light iron, aluminum, magnesium on fire (Score:2)
Btw sometimes I make fireworks. In fireworks, the bright colors you see are metals on fire. Orange-yellow is iron, green is copper, magnesium burns bright white, etc. Fireworks are lit with a match, how do they burn all of these metals?
It happens that things which catch fire at fairly low temperatures (such as jet fuel) tend to give a fairly low temperature flame. Things that light at higher temperatures (such as iron) give a higher temperature flame. So to get magnesium to burn, I combine something that ca
Re:Please mention how the organics were destroyed (Score:5, Funny)
Kind suggestion for Slashdot editors: please mention how the organics were destroyed in the lede. You say they were destroyed but you don't say how.
They did mention it, but that part got destroyed during posting. They were going to mention that, but were afraid of kicking off an infinite edit loop.
[ Editing can be a dangerous life -- but you don't learn that in editing school. ]
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It's an open source router firmware, so I'm guessing it just overheated when a bug caused the CPU to stay at 100% until the organics were destroyed.
It's also a word made up by US print media folks to make their job look more British or something. The word is pronounced the same as "lead," and it refers to the first sentence of a news article. The word is only used in the US. Just ignore it, and it'll go away soon when people get tired of the novelty of a British-looking word that the Brits don't even use.
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If it was meant to look British wouldn't it have a superfluous u?
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The word is pronounced the same as "lead," and it refers to the first sentence of a news article.
Do you mean pronounced as "lead" or pronounced as "lead"?
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The word is pronounced the same as "lead," and it refers to the first sentence of a news article.
Do you mean pronounced as "lead" or pronounced as "lead"?
Rhymes with "read".
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As in "I'll read the poem out loud" or "The foreman read the verdict to the judge."?
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The second one. Or the first, depending.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/bury-the-lede-versus-lead [merriam-webster.com]
Re:Please mention how the organics were destroyed (Score:5, Informative)
The author of the article is clearly a journalism major...
OK, NASA wanted to know whether 'life' was present on Mars. How do we test for 'life?' Well, their approach was to look for stuff that looks like what life on Earth looks like. Mostly, carbon containing, large molecules. Amino acids maybe.
To test for these compounds, they sent a GC/MS, which is a gas chromatograph attached to a mass spectrum analyzer. The GC/MS does a few things -- the chromatography column separates compounds based primarily on boiling point (sort of), and the quadropole (mass analyzer) determines the mass to charge ratio of the charged species, separated by the GC.
Well, not all compounds can 'fly' in a GC. Many 'blow apart' / fragment to such an extent that the 'molecular ion' / parent species is not detected, but rather, only reaction products.
That is sort of what is being proposed here. In order to analyze only the 'volatile' portions of the soil, the soil was slowly heated and the gas that evolved were measured via the GC/MS. This is a standard approach. However, one must always consider a deeper view of the data, and that includes knowing the sample, and what other interferences may be present.
In this case, perchlorate, an acid, was already present in the samples. Perchlorate is a voracious digestor of carbon containing (highly saturated) bonds. The process of heating up the sample would likely have caused a reaction between any large 'organics' in the sample, and the perchlorate that was already present. In which case, reaction products of the perchlorate and 'organics' would be detected - and according to this article - one such product was detected.
However, this small molecule, chlorobenzene, may have come from the manufacturing process of the rover and would not have been a noteworthy detection, had it not possibly indicated perchlorate digestion.
People feel real good about GC/MS data because of the MS...but they forget the sample introduction part.
Garbage in, garbage out. Like everything.
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This is a pretty good summary.
Remember, the Viking lander experiments were designed to work on a planet that no-one had been to before. We expected some solid carbon from meteorites, which ought to be pretty inert even when wartmed. We might hope for a sign of organic (that's chemical organic, though it could be life too). The perchlorates under the surface were a total surprise to everyone. So, it's not the case that the people who designed the experiments were (a) fools and should be fired, or (b) geni
Actually, at the time... (Score:1)
NASA had three separate experiment modules on the Viking lander. One of them was a labelled release (LR) experiment that worked by collecting Martian soil and adding a drop of liquid water that contained nutrients and radioactive carbon atoms. The experiment was that if the soil contained microbes those microbes would metabolize the water with nutrients and release either radioactive carbon dioxide or methane gas which would
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The author of the article is clearly a journalism major...
The author of the article is a public health major. Her bio's right there at the bottom of the page.
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It's obvious how they were destroyed... (Score:2)
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Surely we can do better (Score:2)
This is a pretty terrible article summary and the headline is absurdly hyperbolic. The original design of the Viking experiments was always going to, quite intentionally *destroyed" organic molecules, and in fact, any actual life that existed, at some point. The fact that perchlorates were later discovered, completely unexpectedly, was a wild card that absolutely no one predicted at the time, nor was it a reasonable thing to have imagined.
The headline sounds like it was written by a 12
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The headline sounds like it was written by a 12-year-old
In slashdot terms, that's a fucking compliment.
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The headline sounds like it was written by a 12-year-old
Really? I was more under the impression it was written by someone who doesn't care at all.
Article not suitable for functioning people (Score:2)
Absolute garbage, even reading the /. blurb is insulting.
What commotion? (Score:2)
There's iron in blood, and there's iron in rust. That's part of life as we know it. No one got excited about that.
Big deal. They found atoms are part of the same table of the elements everywhere?
So what?
Science! (Score:2)
NASA blinded themselves with Science!
Gil Levin's experiment had best evidence for life (Score:3)
What did they expect? (Score:1)
Old News (Score:1)
This came out years ago. It was already known there was a flaw in the Viking's instruments that over heated the samples and burned out any evidence.
carbon on mars, so what? (Score:2)