Boy does this look interesting:
I’m assuming it’s some sort of support for the idea that Mars once had life. Could it be more than that?
I’ve maintaining a state of skepticism until they come out with actual information; I don’t want to get my hopes up. Personally I wish they’d have just kept things quiet until they verified whatever it is they are verifying, and revealed the details once they were sure instead of taunting us like this.
And of course it could be something more than evidence of life; an alien artifact would be an obvious example of “something more”, and certainly one “for the history books”. It just isn’t at all likely that it’ll be something that impressive. A more plausible (but also unlikely) example of “something more” would be a fossil that shows evidence that there was large, complex life there at one time.
But unless whatever-it-is is pretty impressive it’ll be considered a disappointment by many after they build it up like this as something “historic”.
I thought it was already understood it had life on the basis it had water, and that Mars somehow lost its atmosphere (and therefore its life)?
No; water is needed for our kind of life, but can exist without life just fine. And there’s speculation that there may still be some hardy forms of bacterial life left on Mars.
It won’t be evidence of life, because that’s not what Curiosity is looking for. If Curiosity found evidence of life completely by accident, it would have to be something macroscopic - bigger than an ant. - and this would be such massive news, there wouldn’t be teasers.
Well yeah, the OP is talking about life in the past tense.
So was I.
It won’t be an organism, it won’t be a fossil either, for the same reasons. It’s going to be a milestone activity or some such.
I wouldn’t get your hopes up too much, this isn’t the first time NASA has made a teaser announcement.
There is no link in the OP, but how is this different from what we’ve already found on asteroids and/or comets?
Sounds like this has been blown out of all proportion I’m afraid. From here:
Bolding mine. That rules out an announcement that life has been discovered, which would indeed be earthshaking. Please bear in mind, as Mangetout pointed out, the Curiosity Rover’s mission isn’t to look for life. It’s to help determine whether Mars could have supported life.
There’s a good chance there is life on Mars *today *- bacteria from Earth, carried aboard one of the dozens of objects we humans have hit it with. No matter how cautiously we’ve tried to keep them sterile, we can’t say we’ve always succeeded. I wouldn’t be shocked at discovering some.
Similar discussion here.
In all fairness, NASA doesn’t want to get burned like they did the last time they discovered “life” on Mars. So, if they had found something, they’d shut the fuck up about it until they had independent verification.
Alternatively, there could be little green men with a ray gun held to the head of the Mars Rover as we speak! :eek:
A ray gun? You show too little awareness of the classics.
An Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator, if you please.
Yes, but it’s going to be much less, I’m sure. Teasing NASA bastards…
When I read your question I asked myself: “What exactly does SAM do?”. The Curiosity website says its job is to support the mission goal of “assess[ing] the biological potential of Gale crater”. SAM has with it a gas chromatograph, a mass spectrometer, and a laser spectrometer. The website describes their specific functions and how they work together, but it seems they are generally for separating out the chemical composition of a sample. So that is all that instrument could ever detect.
The scientist who is apparently the source of the excitement could be excited only over the chemical composition of a sample they collected. Whatever it is, it’s hopefully at least organic or this guy has too low of a threshold for excitement. On the other hand, he could be excited that one of the experiments even worked. I take that as a possibility because I remember how excited I would get when a new assay worked and these scientists and engineers designed experiments that would work nearly independently on another planet.
So I don’t think it could be more than evidence supporting the hypothesis that Mars has or once had an environment suitable for life, because that’s all that the instrument is able to detect. Developing more data that supports the hypothesis instead of refutes or provides no evidence one way or another is pretty awesome.
I’m betting the announcement is that Curiousity was never real and the whole thing was the imaginings of a NASA engineer in a coma.
Maybe they found a metorite from earth that didn’t contain evidence of microbial action. That would indicate there is no life on this planet.
Wild speculation - they found some sort of methane clathrate
Sober rational speculation - they caught a whiff of methane in some dirt.