Too soon to declare 'life' on Mars, says NASA
1 December FOX News
If there are little green men on Mars, they haven’t shown up yet.NASA
has quelled rumors that a “major discovery” from the latest robotic
probe on the Red planet was some form of indication of life. If there’s
anything out there, we haven’t seen it yet, the agency said. “At this
point in the mission, the instruments on the rover have not detected any
definitive evidence of Martian organics,” the space agency said in a
press release issued by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a California
division responsible for the Curiosity probe.
The speculation began on Nov. 20, when Curiosity chief scientist John
Grotzinger of Caltech in Pasadena told NPR “this data is gonna be one
for the history books.” Grotzinger works on a team studying data from
the rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, an onboard
chemistry lab able to identify organic compounds carbon based molecules
that are essentially the building blocks of life.
Grotzinger’s enthusiasm led to wildly overblown speculation that such
compounds as well as biological compounds, little green men, and even
Jimmy Hoffa had been found.
“Rumors and speculation that there are major new findings from the
mission at this early stage are incorrect,” the JPL statement says. “The
news conference will be an update about first use of the rover's full
array of analytical instruments to investigate a drift of sandy soil,”
an important but far less eye catching report.Other scientists have
already made efforts to end speculation, declaring emphatically that the
findings will not be "proof" of life on Mars.
"This is going to be a disappointment," said Chris McKay, a NASA
space scientist at Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. "The
press description of the SAM results as 'earthshaking' is, in my view,
an unfortunate exaggeration. We have not (yet) found anything in SAM
that was not already known from previous missions: Phoenix and Viking,"
he told Space.com.
Curiosity’s SAM tool is also studying the air on Mars in hopes of
detecting methane, something produced by many organisms on Earth. The
robot has found no definitive evidence of the gas yet either.
The Mars Science Laboratory Project and its Curiosity rover are less
than four months into a two year prime mission to investigate whether
conditions in Mars' Gale Crater may have been favorable for microbial
life.
Curiosity is exceeding all expectations for a new mission with all of
the instruments and measurement systems performing well, NASA says.The
mission already has found an ancient riverbed on the Red Planet, and
there is every expectation for remarkable discoveries still to come.
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