Astro Blog

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected what could be a chemical relic of long-ago life on Mars: long-chain organic molecules. Found after painstaking reanalysis of data on a sample drilled from a lake that dried up billions of years ago, the molecules likely derived from fatty acids, a common building block of cell membranes on Earth. The finding,  published  today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is not a definite detection of past life; the fatty acids could also have formed without life. But it’s another in a series of tantalizing hints....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/curiosity-rover-detects-long-chain-carbon-molecules-mars . 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/movies/good-night-oppy-review.html By  Ben Kenigsberg , The New York Times Excerpt: NASA’s  Opportunity Rover  landed on Mars in January 2004 and chugged along for more than 14 years before giving out. (In February 2019, NASA  declared the mission over .) Opportunity’s anticipated time in service — a span that Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the mission, is heard likening in  “Good Night Oppy ” to a warranty — was only around 90 days. Oppy, and to a lesser extent its sister rover, Spirit, which “died” several years earlier, was the robot geologist that refused to quit.  Neither rover, alas, shot cinematic-quality footage of the red planet, but in this documentary from Ryan White ( “Assassins,”   on the killing of Kim Jong-nam), visual effects work from Industrial Light & Magic allows viewers to imagine they’re exploring craters and bedrock right alongside the androids. ... the way “Good Night Oppy” a...

https://eos.org/articles/zhurong-rover-spots-evidence-of-recent-liquid-water-on-mars ]  By Katherine Kornei , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Mars is hardly a verdant world today, yet evidence abounds that liquid water  once flowed over the Red Planet . Now, the latest rover to arrive on Mars’s surface—Zhurong, part of China’s  Tianwen-1 mission —has spotted hydrated minerals that point to liquid water persisting well into the Red Planet’s most recent geologic period. These results,  published in  Science Advances , contribute to our understanding of when liquid water flowed on Mars, the research team has suggested.…

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/science/mars-nasa-perseverance.html By   Kenneth Chang , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...NASA’s Perseverance rover ...On Feb. 18 last year, the spacecraft carrying the rover pierced the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour. ...Twelve months later, Perseverance is nestled within  a 28-mile-wide crater known as Jezero . From the topography, it is evident that more than three billion years ago, Jezero was a body of water roughly the size of Lake Tahoe, with rivers flowing in from the west and out to the east. One of the first things Perseverance did was deploy Ingenuity, a small robotic helicopter and the first such flying machine to take off on another planet. Perseverance also demonstrated a technology for generating oxygen that will be crucial whenever astronauts finally make it to Mars. The rover then set off on a diversion from the original exploration plans, to study the floor of the crater it landed in. ...collect cores of ro...

https://www.science.org/content/article/mars-rover-detects-carbon-signature-hints-past-life-source By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Since 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover has trundled across Mars, drilling into rocks and running the grit through a sophisticated onboard chemistry lab, aiming to tease out evidence for life. Today, a team of rover scientists announced an intriguing signal, one that may or may not be evidence of past life, but is, at the very least, surprisingly weird. The team found that the carbon trapped in a handful of rocks probed by the rover is dramatically enriched in light isotopes of carbon. On Earth, the signal would be seen as strong evidence for ancient microbial life. Given that this is Mars, however, the researchers are reluctant to make any grand claims, and they have worked hard to concoct alternative, nonbiological explanations involving ultraviolet (UV) light and stardust. But those alternatives are at least as far-fetched as a scenario in whi...