NASA announces "an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life"

BY FRED TASKER
ftasker@MiamiHerald.com

The NASA announcement created an enormous Internet buzz: The space agency was going to reveal Thursday ``an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.''

Was the government about to say it had found liquid water on a moon of Jupiter? Microbes on Mars? Something even stranger -- say, ET?

Sci-fi bloggers speculated the announcement ``could prove the existence of aliens'' or ``the theory of shadow creatures that exist in tandem with our own.''

But then the announcement came and it was about . . . bacteria right here on Earth.

At a 2 p.m. news conference streamed live over the Web, scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said they found microbes in the mud beneath a California lake that can use arsenic -- usually considered toxic -- rather than phosphorus as one of the building blocks of its DNA. Phosphorus is one of the elements that sustains all other life forms on earth.

After their great anticipation, sci-fi fans were told the discovery might help cut pollution of waterways like Lake Okeechobee by replacing the phosphorus in fertilizers that run off into the lake, creating fish-choking algae blooms.

One of the NASA researchers acknowledged the frustration after the build-up: ``I can see you're disappointed, that some of you were expecting walking, talking aliens,'' said Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA astrobiology researcher and co-author of the study.

``It would be incredible to announce that we have found an alien. But from our understanding of biology, this is a phenomenal finding. You're taking the fundamental building blocks of life and replacing one of them with another compound.''

She even tried to put a sci-fi spin on it: ``This is the equivalent of the Star Trek episode in which they found life forms on a distant planet that substituted silica for carbon in their basic makeup.

``Maybe we can find ET now because we have a better idea of what we're looking for.''

After the news conference, a University of Miami scientist good-naturedly speculated on what Thursday's announcement might mean for the shape of life on other planets.

``This is a pretty big deal,'' said Athula Wikramanayake, a UM expert in evolutionary biology. ``We've always believed that the basic elements needed for life are carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur and phosphorus,'' he said.

On a planet whose atmosphere is rich in arsenic, ``we wouldn't expect anything resembling humanoids. It's very unlikely they would look like humans.

Wikramanayake agreed with famed physicist Stephen Hawking, who in a newspaper interview in May pointed out that any aliens who arrive on earth from billions of miles away logically will be far more advanced than planet-bound earthlings.

``If aliens ever visit us,'' Hawking warned, ``I think the outcome would be much as when Columbus first landed in America -- which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans.''

``It's possible,'' said Wikramanayake.

``Some planets are billions of years older than earth. They've had a lot of time to evolve.''

Does he agree such aliens would be hostile?

He left a ray of hope: ``It's hard to say whether they would be as aggressive as humans. Humans evolved because of tribal fighting. Aliens might not have the same social history.''



Read more:
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/12/02/1954921/nasa-new-find-a-big-deal-really.html#ixzz173uPcPyq

Science fiction lovers aren’t the only ones captivated by the possibility of colonizing another planet. Scientists are engaging in numerous research projects that focus on determining how habitable other planets are for life. Mars, for example, is revealing more and more evidence that it probably once had liquid water on its surface, and could one day become a home away from home for humans






Can we grow crops on other planets?

Science fiction lovers aren’t the only ones captivated by the possibility of colonizing another planet. Scientists are engaging in numerous research projects that focus on determining how habitable other planets are for life. Mars, for example, is revealing more and more evidence that it probably once had liquid water on its surface, and could one day become a home away from home for humans.


“The spur of colonizing new lands is intrinsic in man,” said Giacomo Certini, a researcher at the Department of Plant, Soil and Environmental Science (DiPSA) at the University of Florence, Italy. “Hence expanding our horizon to other worlds must not be judged strange at all. Moving people and producing food there could be necessary in the future.”

Humans traveling to Mars, to visit or to colonize, will likely have to make use of resources on the planet rather than take everything they need with them on a spaceship. This means farming their own food on a planet that has a very different ecosystem than Earth’s. Certini and his colleague Riccardo Scalenghe from the University of Palermo, Italy, recently published a study in Planetary and Space Science that makes some encouraging claims. They say the surfaces of Venus, Mars and the Moon appear suitable for agriculture.

Defining Soil

Before deciding how planetary soils could be used, the two scientists had to first explore whether the surfaces of the planetary bodies can be defined as true soil.

“Apart from any philosophical consideration about this matter, definitely assessing that the surface of other planets is soil implies that it ‘behaves’ as a soil,” said Certini. “The knowledge we accumulated during more than a century of soil science on Earth is available to better investigate the history and the potential of the skin of our planetary neighbors.”

One of the first obstacles in examining planetary surfaces and their usefulness in space exploration is to develop a definition of soil, which has been a topic of much debate.

“The lack of a unique definition of ‘soil,’ universally accepted, exhaustive, and (one) that clearly states what is the boundary between soil and non-soil makes it difficult to decide what variables must be taken into account for determining if extraterrestrial surfaces are actually soils,” Certini said.


At the proceedings of the 19th World Congress of Soil Sciences held in Brisbane, Australia, in August, Donald Johnson and Diana Johnson suggested a “universal definition of soil.” They defined soil as “substrate at or near the surface of Earth and similar bodies altered by biological, chemical, and/or physical agents and processes.”

On Earth, five factors work together in the formation of soil: the parent rock, climate, topography, time and biota (or the organisms in a region such as its flora and fauna). It is this last factor that is still a subject of debate among scientists. A common, summarized definition for soil is a medium that enables plant growth. However, that definition implies that soil can only exist in the presence of biota. Certini argues that soil is material that holds information about its environmental history, and that the presence of life is not a necessity.

“Most scientists think that biota is necessary to produce soil,” Certini said. “Other scientists, me included, stress the fact that important parts of our own planet, such as the Dry Valleys of Antarctica or the Atacama Desert of Chile, have virtually life-free soils. They demonstrate that soil formation does not require biota.”

The researchers of this study contend that classifying a material as soil depends primarily on weathering. According to them, a soil is any weathered veneer of a planetary surface that retains information about its climatic and geochemical history.

On Venus, Mars and the Moon, weathering occurs in different ways. Venus has a dense atmosphere at a pressure that is 91 times the pressure found at sea level on Earth and composed mainly of carbon dioxide and sulphuric acid droplets with some small amounts of water and oxygen. The researchers predict that weathering on Venus could be caused by thermal process or corrosion carried out by the atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, impacts of large meteorites and wind erosion.

Mars is currently dominated by physical weathering caused by meteorite impacts and thermal variations rather than chemical processes. According to Certini, there is no active volcanism that affects the martian surface but the temperature difference between the two hemispheres causes strong winds. Certini also said that the reddish hue of the planet’s landscape, which is a result of rusting iron minerals, is indicative of chemical weathering in the past.

On the Moon, a layer of solid rock is covered by a layer of loose debris. The weathering processes seen on the Moon include changes created by meteorite impacts, deposition and chemical interactions caused by solar wind, which interacts with the surface directly.

Some scientists, however, feel that weathering alone isn’t enough and that the presence of life is an intrinsic part of any soil.

“The living component of soil is part of its unalienable nature, as is its ability to sustain plant life due to a combination of two major components: soil organic matter and plant nutrients,” said Ellen Graber, researcher at the Institute of Soil, Water and Environmental Sciences at The Volcani Center of Israel’s Agricultural Research Organization.

One of the primary uses of soil on another planet would be to use it for agriculture—to grow food and sustain any populations that may one day live on that planet. Some scientists, however, are questioning whether soil is really a necessary condition for space farming.

Soilless Farming – Not Science Fiction

Growing plants without any soil may conjure up images from a Star Trek movie, but it’s hardly science fiction. Aeroponics, as one soilless cultivation process is called, grows plants in an air or mist environment with no soil and very little water. Scientists have been experimenting with the method since the early 1940s, and aeroponics systems have been in use on a commercial basis since 1983.

“Who says that soil is a precondition for agriculture?” asked Graber. “There are two major preconditions for agriculture, the first being water and the second being plant nutrients. Modern agriculture makes extensive use of ‘soilless growing media,’ which can include many varied solid substrates.”

In 1997, NASA teamed up with AgriHouse and BioServe Space Technologies to design an experiment to test a soilless plant-growth system on board the Mir Space Station. NASA was particularly interested in this technology because of its low water requirement. Using this method to grow plants in space would reduce the amount of water that needs to be carried during a flight, which in turn decreases the payload. Aeroponically-grown crops also can be a source of oxygen and drinking water for space crews.

“I would suspect that if and when humankind reaches the stage of settling another planet or the Moon, the techniques for establishing soilless culture there will be well advanced,” Graber predicted.

Soil: A Key to the Past and the Future


The surface and soil of a planetary body holds important clues about its habitability, both in its past and in its future. For example, examining soil features have helped scientists show that early Mars was probably wetter and warmer than it is currently.

“Studying soils on our celestial neighbors means to individuate the sequence of environmental conditions that imposed the present characteristics to soils, thus helping reconstruct the general history of those bodies,” Certini said.

In 2008, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander performed the first wet chemistry experiment using martian soil. Scientists who analyzed the data said the Red Planet appears to have environments more appropriate for sustaining life than was expected, environments that could one day allow human visitors to grow crops.

“This is more evidence for water because salts are there,” said Phoenix co-investigator Sam Kounaves of Tufts University in a press release issued after the experiment. “We also found a reasonable number of nutrients, or chemicals needed by life as we know it.”

Researchers found traces of magnesium, sodium, potassium and chloride, and the data also revealed that the soil was alkaline, a finding that challenged a popular belief that the martian surface was acidic.

This type of information, obtained through soil analyses, becomes important in looking toward the future to determine which planet would be the best candidate for sustaining human colonies.


Source: Astrobio.net
http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/3689/can-we-grow-crops-on-other-planets

Exploration Rover Spirit got stuck in a pile of red planet mud... where there is mud there might be life...

Scientist believe that they have found new evidence of life on mars after the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit got stuck in a pile of red planet mud. Scientists believe that the discovery shows that water formed on the planet more recently than previously thought.

The Telegraph reports that scientists believed previously that water formed on mars more than a billion years ago. But the new Mars mud has changed that thought, and now it is believed that water may have formed as recently as a few thousand years ago.

The Nasa team, who are based at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said:

“On Earth … hydrothermal systems provide the environmental conditions, water, nutrients and energy sources


needed to sustain robust microbial communities. It seems likely the region (on Mars) … may have likewise supported a habitable environment.”

The Mars Exploration Rover Spirit got stuck last April. The rover broke through the surface crust of Mars, and got stuck in a soft sand below. The incident provided clues that Mars may still be wet.



Read The Full Story: Life on Mars? Rover Gets Stuck in Red Planet Mud

Researchers at the American space agency made the discovery after the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit became stuck in wet ground on the red planet earlier this year.

Astronomers have become excited by the latest discovery, which they say proves that water favourable for life formed on the red planet more recently than previously thought.

Nasa’s latest study, reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research, concluded the liquid likely formed from melting snow, which then trickled into the subsurface and dissolved.

It contained several minerals including hematite, silica and gypsum while ferric sulphates, which are more soluble, also were carried down by the water.

None of these minerals are exposed at the surface, which is covered by windblown sand and dust.

“On Earth … hydrothermal systems provide the environmental conditions, water, nutrients and energy sources needed to sustain robust microbial communities,” concluded the Nasa team, who are based at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

“It seems likely the region (on Mars) … may have likewise supported a habitable environment.”

According to Nasa, the Mars explorer became stuck in April last year when its left wheels broke through the surface’s crust called “Troy” and fell into soft sand below.

The soil exposed by Spirit’s spinning wheels carries clues that Mars may still be wet.

The seepage could have happened during cyclical climate changes in periods when Mars tilted farther on its axis.

"Liquid water and life kind of go together," said Ray Arvidson, of Washington University in St. Louis, who was involved in the project.

Nasa abandoned plans to extract the rover earlier this year

First stop - moons of Mars

Planetary travel "within few years" Funded by DARPA, NASA

A SENIOR NASA official has promised to deliver a spaceship that will travel between alien worlds "within a few years".

Speaking at a conference in San Francisco on Saturday, NASA Ames director Simon Worden said his division had started a project with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency called the "Hundred Year Starship”.

The project was kicked off recently with $1 million funding from DARPA and $100K from NASA and hopes to utilise new propulsion ideas being explored by NASA.

Star Trek fans, prepare to get excited - electric propulsion is here, according to Mr Worden.

“Anybody that watches the (Star Trek) Enterprise, you know you don’t see huge plumes of fire," he said.

"Within a few years we will see the first true prototype of a spaceship that will take us between worlds.”


“You heard it here,” he told the crowd at the “Long Conversation”.

“Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.”

Mr Worden said he hoped to "inveigle some billionaires" such as Google founder Larry Page to help with further funding for the project.

Another possible source of propulsion being funded by NASA was by using microwave power from a planetary base to heat hydrogen propellants on board an orbiting spaceship.

"You don’t have to carry all the fuel," he said. "You use that energy from a laser or microwave power to heat a propellant; it gets you a pretty big factor of improvement. I think that’s one way of getting off the world.”

Mr Worden had an interesting take on how we would settle other worlds when we found them, suggesting it would be easier to adapt humans to an alien planet than changing the planet to suit humans.

“How do you live in another world? I don’t have the slightest idea,” he said.

“If you’re a conservative, you worry about it killing us; if you’re a liberal, you worry about us killing it."

Despite his ambitious vision to push further out into the galaxy, Mr Worden said there was still plenty of work to do in our own backyard first.

First stop, he said, was the moons of Mars, from where the planet itself can be explored using telerobotics.

“I think we’ll be on the moons of Mars by 2030 or so," he said.

"Larry (Page) asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, ‘Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?’

"So now we’re starting to get a little argument over the price.”



http://www.news.com.au/technology/nasa-preps-100-year-spaceship-programme-to-boldly-go-where-none-have-gone-before/story-e6frfro0-1225941547507#ixzz13D8IALAk

Not 'life,' but maybe 'organics' on Mars

By Marc Kaufman Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 4, 2010; A1

Thirty-four years after NASA's Viking missions to Mars sent back results interpreted to mean there was no organic material - and consequently no life - on the planet, new research has concluded that organic material was found after all.

The finding does not bring scientists closer to discovering life on Mars, researchers say, but it does open the door to a greater likelihood that life exists, or once existed, on the planet.

"We can now say there is organic material on Mars, and that the Viking organics experiment that didn't find any had most likely destroyed what was there during the testing," said Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

"For decades NASA's mantra for Mars was 'follow the water' in the search for life, and we know today that water has been all over the planet," he said. "Now the motto is 'follow the organics' in the search for life."

The original 1976 finding of "no organics" was controversial from the start because organic matter - complex carbons with oxygen and hydrogen, which are the basis of life on Earth - is known to fall on Mars, as onto Earth and elsewhere, all the time. Certain kinds of meteorites are rich in organics, as is the interstellar dust that falls from deep space and blankets planets.

The new results, published in the -Journal of Geophysical Research of Planets and highlighted Friday in a NASA news release, flow directly from a discovery made by NASA's Phoenix lander in 2008.

Mary Voytek, senior scientist for astrobiology at NASA, said the findings demonstrate the ever-present risk of reaching "false negatives" in space based on limitations of the equipment used and of the scientists' understanding of conditions beyond Earth.

She said the research does not fully knock down the original "no-organics" conclusion because the new experiment was done using desert soil from Earth, which might behave differently from seemingly similar Martian dirt. But she said the research does put another "significant chink" in the no-organics position.

The new research examined the effects on organics of a compound that Phoenix unexpectedly found at its landing site on northern Mars.

The discovery of the highly reactive chemical perchlorate led NASA's Christopher McKay, an astrobiologist at the Ames Research Center, and Navarro-Gonzalez to test whether the perchlorate had skewed the Viking results that showed no sign of organic material on Mars.

The two researchers combined magnesium perchlorate with soil from the most Mars-like environment on Earth - the Atacama Desert in Chile - and heated the sample in the same way that it was heated by Viking instruments on Mars.

The researchers found that the small amount of organic material known to be in the Atacama soil was detectable when mixed with the perchlorate at low temperatures but was broken up into water and carbon dioxide when heated alongside the perchlorate. The Viking experiment had heated the sample to a similarly high temperature.

Perchlorate, which consists of chlorine and oxygen, actively absorbs electrons from surrounding compounds when heated. "It could sit there in the Martian soil with organics around it for billions of years and not break them down," McKay said. "But when you heat the soil to check for organics, the perchlorate destroys them rapidly."

In addition, the researchers found evidence of the organic compound chloromethane after they heated the Atacama soil with perchlorate. That compound had been detected during the organics experiments at both Viking landing sites but had been written off as a contaminant from Earth because it is in cleaning fluids.

Navarro-Gonzalez said his team ran the experiment many times and always produced some form of chloromethane, leading to the conclusion that it was being formed by the combining of the perchlorate with some form of organic Mars material.

"The big lesson here, and the great importance of this finding, is that we have to know what we're looking for and how we can find it," Voytek said. "It shows that we could actually uncover life on Mars and not know it."

That is what some believe already happened on Mars. A life-detection experiment on both Viking landers gave a positive signal that something in the soil was metabolizing a food source introduced and a negative signal in the control experiment. The principle investigator of that experiment, Gilbert Levin, has argued for more than 30 years that Viking did, indeed, find life.

It was the no-organics conclusion of a subsequent Viking experiment that convinced scientists that Levin's test had detected a non-biological chemical reaction. Although many planetary scientists have remained convinced that Levin did not find life, the increasingly apparent problems with the no-organics experiment are leading some to reconsider.

The new paper will also be important for NASA's 2011 Mars Science Laboratory mission, which is designed specifically to find organic material on the planet. The mission's Curiosity rover has some of the same high-temperature equipment to detect organics that Viking had, although it also has a secondary experiment that involves solvents at low temperatures.

Navarro-Gonzalez is on the MSL science team and will bring his new interpretation of Martian chemistry to the effort. Confirming the presence of organic material on the Martian surface and learning about its properties, he said, would add enormous impetus to the search for possible Martian life.


Here is the update from the article below:

Recent experiments in Chile could provide hope that living microbes may yet exist on Mars, despite data collected by NASA’s Viking landers in 1976 that have generally been interpreted as showing no evidence of life.The new studies, conducted by Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez and a geophysical team from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), suggest that the Viking data have been misinterpreted and that carbon-rich organic molecules may be present on Mars after all.The renewed interest in reviewing the Viking data stems from the discovery of the chlorine-containing chemical perchlorate by the Phoenix Mars lander in 2008. The perchlorate ion, comprising chlorine and oxygen, was detected by the spacecraft’s wet chemistry laboratory during the first-ever analysis of this type of Martian soil. The analysis of three samples — two from the surface and one from 5 cm. depth — revealed the presence of perchlorate, as well as a slightly alkaline soil and low levels of salts.Dry LandIn response, researchers from UNAM visited Yungay in the heart of Chile’s Atacama Desert to conduct experiments on soils found in an environment similar to that on Mars. With an average rainfall of less than 0.004 in./0.01 cm. per year, the Atacama is the driest place on Earth and includes zones that are thought to have had no rain for approximately 400 years. “These soils have extremely low levels of culturable bacteria, low organic concentrations, and the presence of a non-chirally [identical] specific oxidant,” say the researchers, who add that the “search for organics in this soil sample has been thoroughly investigated using the Viking and Phoenix landers protocols.”In the experiment, the researchers mixed the soil with perchlorate and heated it to produce carbon dioxide as well as traces of chloromethane and dichloromethane. These same gases were also detected in the chemical reactions after the Viking landers heated the Martian soil, suggesting that not only perchlorate but also organics may have been present. Following the Viking landings, the same chlorine-containing organic compounds were thought to be contaminants carried on the spacecraft.Peter Smith, the principal investigator of the Phoenix Mars Mission at the University of Arizona, says the misinterpretation of the Viking results may have effectively put researchers on a different track for the past 30 years. “The perchlorate seen out of the results from 1976 was dismissed as contaminants from the cleaning agents used on Viking,” he says. As a result of the new evidence, he says that when NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission reaches the planet in 2012, “I predict we will fully measure organics on Mars at the 10 [parts per million] level.”Commenting at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Space 2010 conference in Anaheim, Calif., Smith offers a note of caution. “I don’t think we’ll find out for sure until we go there for ourselves, and we get samples from the right places. I don’t think there’s anything more exciting than going to Mars and bringing back samples. That will be the capstone of the 21st century in my view.”The MSL Curiosity rover is being tested at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and is scheduled for launch in late 2011 and for a landing on Mars in August 2012. The largest rover ever sent to the planet, Curiosity will be configured with 10 instruments to search for environments where life might have existed and the capacity of those environments to preserve evidence of past life.

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_channel.jsp?channel=space&id=news%2Fasd%2F2010%2F09%2F08%2F11.xml&headline=Fresh+Research+Rekindles+Life+On+Mars+Debate

This is vindication for Gilbert Levin, one of the chief scientists for those missions, who had said so then and was subsequently pilloried for it.

For all the triumph of NASA’s 1976 Viking mission, which put two unmanned spacecraft on Mars, there was one major disappointment: The landers failed to find carbon-based molecules that could serve as the building blocks of life.

The complete lack of these organic molecules was a surprise, and the notion of a desolate, lifeless Mars persisted for years.

Now, some scientists say that conclusion was premature and perhaps even incorrect. They suggest that such building blocks — known as organic molecules, although they need not come from living organisms — were indeed in the soil, but that they were inadvertently destroyed before they could be detected.

If true, that could cast the scientific conclusions of the Viking mission in a new light, especially since another Viking experiment claimed to have found living microbes in the soil. Most scientists discounted that possibility — how could there be life in soil devoid of the building blocks of life?

“That gospel of the Viking results has influenced our perspective on life of Mars for 35 years,” said Christopher McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California and an author of the new findings, to be published in The Journal of Geophysical Research — Planets. “What do they find? Nothing. But it turns out it was not really nothing.”

The Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers scooped Martian soil samples and heated them, looking for organic compounds in the released gases. It found only two — chloromethane and dichloromethane — and the scientists concluded that the chlorine compounds were contaminants from fluids used to clean the spacecraft.

Then in 2008, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander unexpectedly found a chlorine chemical, perchlorate, in the planet’s arctic soil.

In the new experiments, the scientists heated a mixture of perchlorate with soil from the Atacama Desert in Chile, often considered the closest thing on Earth to Mars. Chemical reactions destroyed organic compounds in the soil, producing mostly carbon dioxide and traces of chloromethane and dichloromethane, just like what the Viking landers had found.

“Now when we look back at the Viking results, it makes sense,” Dr. McKay said. “It was bizarre chemistry.”

For the veteran Mars researcher Gilbert V. Levin, the new paper offers a measure of vindication. His Viking experiment added nutrients to the soil and measured releases of radioactive gas, which would occur as microbes ate the food. Radioactive gas was released, but with the lack of organics in the soil, most concluded it had come from a nonbiological chemical reaction.

Rafael Navarro-González of the National Autonomous University of Mexico City and lead author of the new study, said the claim that Viking found life was still inconclusive. “It gives a big possibility,” he said, “but of course we don’t know.”

Dr. Levin acknowledged that nonbiological reactions could cause gas to be released, but said the Viking experiment showed that whatever was producing the gas did so at temperatures plausible for microbes but not for other explanations.

But the leader of the Viking organics experiment, Klaus Biemann, a retired professor at M.I.T., doubts the new interpretation. He noted that the experiment also detected freon, which was certainly a contaminant, and that the presence of perchlorate at the Viking sites, far from where the Phoenix landed, was speculation.

More definitive answers could come with the Mars Science Laboratory, scheduled to be launched next year and to arrive in 2012. It will carry an experiment that will be able to separate perchlorates from organic molecules and thus allow it to identify the organics without destroying them.

Martian mud volcanoes may hold the secret to life on Mars

Mud volcanoes are unusual geological structures that blast up sediments from deep underground. Such volcanoes are doubly perfect places to look for life on Mars - they spew out secrets of ancient Mars while providing the perfect environment for life.

Mud volcanoes are structures in which gas, liquid and mud (or, more technically speaking, fine-grained rock) are shot up from miles underground in much the same way regular volcanoes force up magma. The sentiments revealed by these volcanoes come from buried layers that we wouldn't normally be able to see without drilling deep into the red planet's surface. According to NASA scientist Dorothy Oehler, that helps make the mud volcanoes of Mars's Acidalia Planitia the perfect place to look for life:

"If there was life on Mars, it probably developed in a fluid-rich environment. Mud volcanoes themselves are an indicator of a fluid-rich subsurface, and they bring up material from relatively deep parts of the subsurface that we might not have a chance to see otherwise."

Oehler and her research partner Carlton Allen have mapped 18,000 mud volcanoes in this region of Mars, and they estimate another 20,000 or so could be found if mapping continues. They used new images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter along with data from a state-of-the-art imaging spectrometer to first find the volcanoes and then to figure out their mineralogical makeup. These studies showed conclusively that they were indeed mud volcanoes, ruling out the possibilities that they were caused by other processes like meteorite impacts, ice, or evaporation.

We've known about the volcanoes since the Viking probe discovered them in the 1970s, but only recently have astronomers suggested they could be mud volcanoes. One of the first to suggest this possibility was Kenneth Tanaka of the U.S. Geological Survey:

"I also thought that these features, which also occur elsewhere in the northern plains of Mars, were good places to search for signs of life. If life were present in the subsurface, the water and slurries involved in forming the mud volcanoes would have brought it to the surface. While life may not have survived at the surface, it at least could have been brought there by this process."

The Martian surface is probably too tough an environment for life to survive up there, but it's possible microbes still survive deep down below. The sediments ejected by these volcanoes would give today's probes and robotic rovers - and, by extension, the scientists back on Earth - an opportunity to test the Martian underground for signs of organic life. It's our best chance to study deeply buried layers until we can build a drill on Mars, something that is probably decades away.

Still, there's still room for skepticism. As Tanaka points out, we may be getting to the mud volcanoes too late to learn the secrets they might have held:

"There has been a great amount of time [for UV radiation and other surface processes] to destroy possible microfossils in surface rocks and soils. For this reason, it is unclear if these features are the best places to search for preserved life. Better places might include recent crater impacts and deposits from younger flood discharges."

And yet, Oehler remains optimistic. It all comes down to that perfect combination of the right location for life to emerge and the right mechanism to bring the evidence up to the surface:

"We do believe that Acidalia is a place where life could have been abundant because of long-lived water sources. It is one of the better places to look for evidence of life - if life ever developed on Mars."

[Icarus via Astrobio]

Send an email to Alasdair Wilkins, the author of this post, at alasdair@io9.com.