Mars Curiosity Rover Finds All But 1 Element Needed For Life on Mars

[Ichingcarpenter]

Scientists at NASA are reporting that a rock sample taken by NASA’s Curiosity Rover indicates that the surface of ancient Mars has all the elements needed to support life, except one.

This team of NASA scientists are indicating that some of the key chemical ingredients that support life, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon, where in the powder that the Curiosity Rover’s drillbit displaced while drilling into a piece of sedimentary rock in close proximity to an ancient riverbed in Gale Crater on Mars last month.

“A fundamental question for this mission is whether Mars could have supported a habitable environment,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, part of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (CALTECH) “from what we know now, the answer is yes.”

The missing piece of the puzzle for the discovery of previous life on Mars is water.



http://www.miakulpa.com/mars-curiosity-rover-finds-all-but-1-element-needed-for-life-on-mars/


And that's the first place they dug and analyzed.

This looks very promising that life will be found or at least signs of ancient life.

[trotsky]

1. Sorry, this made my inner science geek cringe.

Water isn't an element.

[Webster Green]

2. Still grammatically correct in the context.

The missing element need not be an actual "element". In this context it is the missing ingredient. Calling it the missing element is correct.

[HubertHeaver]

4. I'll cringe along with you.

[Jackpine Radical]

5. Right, but the term "element" has more than one meaning,

at least when you get outside the physical science context.

I was confused too, wondering what element (other than C, H, O, N & a few others) would be absolutely necessary for life, and at first missed the writer's claim that water was the missing "element." However, in common parlance, an element can refer to a component in general. It's really elementary, now that I think of it.

Anyway, given the prevalence of amino acids in space, I suppose we don't have to speculate as much about other life forms being, for example, Si-based instead of C. Unless, of course, Si forms are more stable in certain environments that would be hostile to C-based life or something.


http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2003/aug/11/amino-acid-detected-in-space

[sofa king]

13. Heehee, so does the term "life."

But we know which one NASA is talking about because they didn't announce the absence of milk.

As a nerd who cannot resist casting bets on the future, I think the biggest disappointment we're going to face in the search for life is not in failing to find it in other places in the solar system, but discovering that Earth has long since contaminated most or all of those places with earth-based life.

The K-T event, for example, probably ejected tons of bacteria-laden material at earth escape velocity or greater. I think it's possible we'll find our ancestors, or evidence of their past existence, on Mars, Ceres, Europa, Callisto, Japetus, and Enceladus, and others, and the debates will rage for decades as to whether or not we're finding alien life or stowaways from the reconnaissance craft themselves.

That may be why NASA is already deliberately steering away from direct tests for life and instead trying so hard to lay out an undeniable case for life-favorable conditions. Mother Earth may never have been keeping all its eggs in one basket, unlike we mere humans. The harder question will be whether any other places in the solar system did it independently of Earth.

[Ichingcarpenter]

6. I agree it made me cringe too but

teaching high school science but non the less I was curious on the other elements. I wonder the percentages they found in relation to each other? The nitrogen was a surprise .

[n2doc]

8. +1000

Science writing doesn't have to be this stupid.

Water has been detected on Mars in other places, in any case.

[Salviati]

3. To some extent, here's hoping that they _don't_ find life, past or present.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

[dreamnightwind]

9. My take on that:

from the link you supplied (most interesting, thanks, I had not heard of this):

1. The right star system (including organics and potentially habitable planets)
2. Reproductive molecules (e.g., RNA)
3. Simple (prokaryotic) single-cell life
4. Complex (archaeatic and eukaryotic) single-cell life
5. Sexual reproduction
6. Multi-cell life
7. Tool-using animals with big brains
8. Where we are now
9. Colonization explosion.

According to the Great Filter hypothesis at least one of these steps - if the list were complete - must be improbable. If it's not an early step (i.e. in our past), then the implication is that the improbable step lies in our future and our prospects of reaching step 9 (interstellar colonization) are still bleak. If the past steps are likely, then many civilizations would have developed to the current level of the human race. However, none appear to have made it to step 9, or the Milky Way would be full of colonies. So perhaps step 9 is the unlikely one, and the only thing that appears likely to keep us from step 9 is some sort of catastrophe or the resource exhaustion leading to impossibility to make the step due to consumption of the available resources (like for example highly constrained energy resources). So by this argument, finding multicellular life on Mars (provided it evolved independently) would be bad news, since it would imply steps 2–6 are easy, and hence only 1, 7, 8 or 9 (or some unknown step) could be the big problem.

Although steps 1–7 have occurred on Earth, any one of these may be unlikely. If the first seven steps are necessary preconditions to calculating the likelihood (using the local environment) then an anthropically biased observer can infer nothing about the general probabilities from its (pre-determined) surroundings.

------------------

9 is improbable because 7 ate 9. Resource depletion.

[greiner3]

7. "Mars Curiosity Rover Finds All But 1 Element Needed For Life on Mars"

TWINKIES!

[tridim]

10. So the ice at the poles isn't water?

[Ichingcarpenter]

11. Curiosity is not a the pole

This finding is from their first soil sample and drilling


Still confused?

[tridim]

12. Not confused, just pointing out that there is indeed water on Mars.

The missing element isn't missing.