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Life on Mars: NASA’s Curiosity rover tests new way to find aliens

Curiosity

A self-portrait taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

NASA’s Curiosity rover has examined a brand new method for locating indicators of alien life on Mars. Though the rover discovered no such proof, it means that future missions to different worlds may use the identical technique.

In March 2017, the rover scooped materials from the Bagnold Dunes, a band of sand dunes stretching tens of kilometres on the floor. In December 2017, Curiosity transferred a few of this materials into its Pattern Evaluation at Mars (SAM) instrument.

SAM has 74 “cups”, or holders, which are used to analyse Martian samples. Most are empty, with the samples in them heated by the rover to be studied, however 9 include solvents that may dissolve the samples, which permits us to raised work out their compositions. The check in December 2017 noticed a few of these solvents used for the primary time, to see whether or not this method may very well be helpful on different worlds.

The outcomes confirmed it may. After years of cautious work on Earth to grasp what they have been seeing, Maëva Millan at Georgetown College in Washington DC and her colleagues discovered proof for natural molecules within the samples that may have been missed by the rover’s common evaluation. Whereas they didn’t discover any concrete proof of life, comparable to amino acids, the outcomes confirmed the advantages of those so-called “moist chemistry derivatization” experiments.

“We now have proved that this experiment can work,” says Millan. “Meaning we are able to do that identical experiment once more on totally different minerals like clay and sulphates that may higher protect natural molecules.”

That may embrace additional research on the floor of Mars by Curiosity in areas which are extra conducive to life. Its sister rover, Perseverance, can also be searching for indicators of life, however doesn’t have the identical “moist chemistry” gear.

The method shall be used on future missions, comparable to Europe’s upcoming Rosalind Franklin Mars rover launching in 2022 and NASA’s Dragonfly mission, a drone that can discover the floor of Saturn’s moon Titan in 2036. “Now we all know we’re in a position to make it work on the floor of one other planet,” says Millan.

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Journal reference: Nature Astronomy, DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01507-9

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