A science experiment aboard NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered tantalizing traces of potential previous life on Mars. However there may very well be different explanations for the place these compounds got here from.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
So a science experiment aboard NASA’s Curiosity Rover has discovered tantalizing traces of potential previous life on Mars.
DANIEL GLAVIN: We’re actually dwelling sort of a science fiction movie, if you’ll, right here. It is simply superb that we will even do that.
CHANG: Daniel Glavin is an astrobiologist with NASA – cool job – and he is a part of the workforce that has detected the biggest natural molecules ever discovered on the purple planet.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The molecules got here from a pattern of three.7 billion-year-old Martian mudstone dug up in Gale Crater, the positioning of an historic lake. Glavin says the compounds may very well be the remnants of what is known as fatty acids.
GLAVIN: Effectively, what’s a fatty acid? These are parts of cells. The cell membrane contains fatty acids. So these are actually essential and demanding constructing blocks of life.
CHANG: However earlier than you get too excited, there may very well be different explanations for the place these items got here.
GLAVIN: They might have been delivered to Gale Crater by meteorites. They will also be shaped by sort of pure geological processes. After which the third chance is that we’re wanting on the historic chemical remnants of life, that biology truly constructed these fatty acids.
CHANG: He says there’s just one strategy to know for positive.
GLAVIN: A subsequent logical step right here is to deliver again samples from Mars, deliver them residence, so we will lastly get at this age-old query about whether or not or not there was ever life on Mars.
SUMMERS: Doing so will probably be a journey, however that is nothing new for Glavin. This new discovery took greater than a decade to return to fruition.
GLAVIN: We first drilled this historic Martian mudstone pattern in Could of 2013, and right here we at the moment are nearly 13 years later, the place we’re lastly in a position to report the invention.
SUMMERS: Their findings seem within the proceedings of the Nationwide Academy of Sciences.
CHANG: So what’s subsequent? Effectively, the primary a part of that pattern return mission – it is already underway. A distinct Mars rover known as Perseverance landed on the planet again in 2021, and it has been accumulating tubes of mud and rock and packing them in its stomach.
SUMMERS: Someday sooner or later, one other spacecraft will land on Mars, take these tubes and blast into Martian orbit. Then a second spacecraft will rendezvous in orbit, deliver the samples again to earth and drop them in Utah. Effectively, that is the plan, at the least.
GLAVIN: If every part goes completely, this may occur within the mid-2030s, 2035. However once more, so much has to go proper. The one factor that we have finished right here is we have demonstrated we will land on Mars. So launching off the floor of Mars, orbiting with a pattern in Mars orbit, rendezvousing, capturing it – all of that’s mainly the primary time we’d ever have demonstrated that.
CHANG: So it could be some time earlier than scientists on Earth have Mars mud of their fingers. However the truth that these molecules endured billions of years on Mars – that signifies any traces of previous life can in all probability wait just a few extra years – proper? – till Earthlings determine methods to deliver these samples residence.
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