Sunday, December 2, 2012

Mars just seems to have that effect on people.



The next news conference about the NASA Mars rover Curiosity will be held at 9 a.m. PST(12 p.m. EST) Monday, Dec. 3, in San Francisco at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). 

Rumors and speculation that there are major new findings from the mission at this early stage are incorrect. The news conference will be an update about first use of the rover's full array of analytic instruments to investigate a drift of sandy soil. One class of substances Curiosity is checking for is organic compounds -- carbon-containing chemicals that can be ingredients for life. At this point in the mission, the instruments on the rover have not detected any definitive evidence of Martian organics. - JPL NEWS RELEASE 2012-377b
As noted in an earlier posting here, the director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said last week that preliminary data showed the possibility that the agency's Mars Science Laboratory  –  better knowed as Curiosity — had found signs of carbon-containing molecules as "one for the history books."
According to the above  JPL news release, there will be no major announcements Monday in San Francisco at the  annual meeting of American Geophysical Union. 
The science team is continuing to try and verify what the rover has found. "Carbon compounds are  a substance that's consistent with biological materials," says John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology, the chief scientist on the rover team, but Grotzinger says it doesn't have to be biological materials; there are plenty of carbon-containing compounds that have nothing to do with life.
However, finding these carbon molecules would be exciting because of what it might say about the Martian environment where the rover is sitting at the bottom of Gale crater. If one kind of carbon can survive there, it might just be a place where carbon molecules that are related to living organisms could also survive as a kind of chemical fossil.
"There wouldn't be a field of paleontology unless you found the hot spots where things get preserved," Grotzinger says. The NASA Mars rover Curiosity  is looking for those hot spots; places where carbon-containing chemicals consistent with life might have been preserved and still exist. "[But] even if they have nothing to do with life, at least it tells us that this is the kind of environment that might have been favorable for preservation of something that could be a biological material," he says.
Even the possibility of finding carbon compounds on Mars causes excitement, which certainly is not true for every planet. In the current issue of the Journal Science, researchers reported they were virtually certain that had found large deposits of organic compounds on the planet Mercury, and that wasn't front page news. 
"I can tell you anytime when you find anything with Mars, it's a frenzy," says Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the Mercury researchers who also works on Mars.

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