NewScientist reports that previous martian landers could have destroyed the very life that they were seeking to find:
Instead of identifying chemicals that could point to life, NASA’s robot explorers may have been toasting them by mistake.
The Phoenix and Viking landers looked for organic molecules by heating soil samples to similarly high temperatures to evaporate them and analyse them in gas form. When Douglas Ming of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and colleagues tried heating organics and perchlorates like this on Earth, the resulting combustion left no trace of organics behind. Ming’s team presented their results at the recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston.
Jeffrey Bada of the University of California, San Diego, agrees that a new approach is needed. He is leading work on a new instrument called Urey for the European Space Agency’s ExoMars rover, due to launch in 2016, which will be able to detect organic material at concentrations as low as a few parts per trillion. The good news is that, although Urey heats its samples, it does so in water, so the organics cannot burn up.
An interesting theory. One of the things scientists are learning is that life comes in many forms. It’s difficult to know how to precisely test for something when you don’t know what it might be.
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