Curiosity Rover’s Secret Historic Breakthrough? Speculation Centers on Organic Molecules

Much of the internet is buzzing over upcoming “big news” from NASA’s Curiosity rover, but the space agency’s scientists are keeping quiet about the details.

The report comes by way of the rover’s principal investigator, geologist John Grotzinger of Caltech, who said that Curiosity has uncovered exciting new results from a sample of Martian soil recently scooped up and placed in the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument.

“This data is gonna be one for the history books. It’s looking really good,” Grotzinger told NPR in an segment published Nov. 20. Curiosity’s SAM instrument contains a vast array of tools that can vaporize soil and rocks to analyze them and measure the abundances of certain light elements such as carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen – chemicals typically associated with life.

The mystery will be revealed shortly, though. Grotzinger told Wired through e-mail that NASA would hold a press conference about the results during the 2012 American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco from Dec. 3 to 7. Because it’s so potentially earth-shaking, Grotzinger said the team remains cautious and is checking and double-checking their results. But while NASA is refusing to discuss the findings with anyone outside the team, especially reporters, other scientists are free to speculate.

“If it’s going in the history books, organic material is what I expect,” says planetary scientist Peter Smith from the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Smith is formerly the principal investigator on a previous Mars mission, the Phoenix lander, which touched down at the Martian North Pole in 2008. “It may be just a hint, but even a hint would be exciting.”

Smith added that he is not in contact with anyone from the Curiosity team about their results and offered his assessment as an informed outside researcher.

Organic molecules are those that contain carbon and are potential indicators of life. During its mission, Phoenix heated a sample of soil to search for organics but these efforts were stymied by the presence of perchlorates, chemical salts that sit in the Martian soil. Perchlorates react to heat and destroy any complex organic molecules, leaving only carbon dioxide, which is abundant in the Martian atmosphere.

The Viking landers, which explored opposite sides of Mars in the late 1970s, also conducted a search for organic molecules and came up empty. For decades afterward, astronomers considered Mars to be a dead planet, with conditions not very conducive to life. After the results from Phoenix, scientists realized that perchlorates were probably messing with those earlier findings as well, and could account for their negative outcome.

Curiosity’s suite of laboratory instruments are able to slowly heat a sample in a way that doesn’t trigger the perchlorates. They can also weigh any molecules present, determining how much carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen they are made from. Simple organic compounds wouldn’t be completely shocking, said Smith, since these probably come from meteorites originating in the asteroid belt and probably are around on present-day Mars. But they would indicate that the building blocks for life are present on Mars and might only need the addition of water, which Mars had in the past, in order to produce organisms.

“If they found signatures of a very complex organic type, that would be astounding,” said Smith, since they would likely be leftovers from complex life forms that once roamed Mars. But the odds of finding such a startling result in a sample of sand scooped from a random dune are “very, very low,” Smith said.

Smith cautioned against speculating too much, since rumors have a way of spreading rapidly when it comes to any discussion of potential life on Mars. During his tenure on the Phoenix mission, his team was evaluating the interesting perchlorate results, which they kept secret during analysis. Rumors got out and then became worse when some unsubstantiated report claimed a member of his team meeting was meeting with the White House.

“When you keep things secret, people start thinking all kinds of crazy things,” he said.

ikenbot:

Part of the Tarantula Nebula

One square degree image of the Tarantula Nebula and its surroundings. The spidery nebula is seen in the upper-centre of the image.

Slightly to the lower-right, a web of filaments harbours the famous supernova SN 1987A (see below). Many other reddish nebulae are visible in the image, as well as a cluster of young stars on the left, known as NGC 2100.

Technical information: the image is based on observations carried out by Joao Alves (Calar Alto, Spain), Benoit Vandame and Yuri Beletski (ESO) with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) at the 2.2-m telescope on La Silla. These data consist of a 2x2 WFI mosaic in the B- and V-bands, and in the H-alpha and [OIII] narrow bands. The data were first processed with the ESO/MVM pipeline by the Advanced Data Products (ADP) group at ESO.

space-pics:

Saturns moon, Enceladus vents water from its south pole. Taken by Cassini on December 25, 2009.

http://space-pics.tumblr.com/

bloodredorion:

daniellawhon:

destronomics:

GUYS THIS IS PEPPER’S SHIRT GUYS HOW GODDAMN ADORABLE IS THIS.

I BET TONY BOUGHT IT FOR HER

OR MAYBE SHE’S WEARING ONE OF TONY’S SHIRTS

ALSO, FAIR WARNING: MY BLOG WILL BE MOSTLY AN IM FAN BLOG FOR A WHILE NOW THAT THIS TRAILER IS OUT

I APOLOGIZE IN ADVANCE

XDD Going with Daniel’s theory here.

expose-the-light:

Orionid Meteor Shower of 2012

christinetheastrophysicist:

Mapping the Universe in 3-D

Combining observations from Mauna Kea with data taken by telescopes in space, astronomers at the Institute for Astronomy (UH Manoa) and their collaborators have developed a technique that allows them to map collisions of giant galaxy clusters in three dimensions. 

Astronomers studying the solar system are fortunate. Their targets move, rotate, obscure and deflect each other on timescales of hours, months or years, allowing researchers to see them from different angles.  Scientists exploring the distant universe are at a disadvantage in this regard. Most of their targets, such as black holes, galaxies, or clusters of galaxies, are so huge that it takes tens or hundreds of millions of years for an object to present us with a noticeably changed view.

“Being unable to see these large-scale structures from different angles makes it very difficult to figure out their three-dimensional shapes, let alone their relative motions and interactions,” explains Harald Ebeling, IfA astronomer and an expert on galaxy clusters.  “All we see in our images is a 2-D projection of a 3-D structure onto the plane of the sky.”

Luckily, when two galaxy clusters collide, astronomers can make use of a clever combination of observations to make the invisible visible. In three recent studies, Dr. Ebeling and an international team of collaborators created 3-D models of merging galaxy clusters. Creating these models requires mapping all the components of a cluster: the galaxies that we see in visible light, the hot gas permeating the cluster that emits X-rays, and the invisible dark matter that can be detected only because its gravity distorts the images of objects behind the cluster. 

Read More.

moderation:

Atoms Alien to Our Solar System Detected

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Early this year, NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer, the centerpiece of a $169 million mission mapping the frontier of the sun’s influence, detected atoms from interstellar space streaming by Earth that are different from the chemical make-up of the solar system. 

“Our solar system is different than the space right outside it, suggesting two possibilities,” said David McComas, IBEX principal investigator, at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “Either the solar system evolved in a separate, more oxygen-rich part of the galaxy than where we currently reside, or a great deal of critical, life-giving oxygen lies trapped in interstellar dust grains or ices, unable to move freely throughout space.”

The IBEX satellite observed hydrogen, oxygen, neon and helium atoms that originated in interstellar space, the vacuous medium between stars in the Milky Way galaxy and found 74 oxygen atoms for every 20 neon atoms in the interstellar material, compared with 111 oxygen atoms for every 20 neon atoms inside the solar system. Most of the interstellar medium is made up of hydrogen and helium. Heavier elements, such as oxygen and neon, are spread by exploding supernovae at the end of a star’s life cycle, according to NASA.

(via dailygalaxy)