On 2020-08-01 23:47, jacob navia wrote:


[snip]

And now they send YET ANOTHER MACHINE WITH NO MICROSCOPE!

Perseverance will persevere in avoiding discovering any trace of life in
Mars and will ignore all the results of its instruments. They send now:


[snip]

o Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics
& Chemicals (SHERLOC)
A spectrometer that will provide fine-scale imaging and uses an
ultraviolet (UV) laser to determine fine-scale mineralogy and detect
organic compounds. SHERLOC will be the first UV Raman spectrometer to
fly to the surface of Mars and will provide complementary measurements
with other instruments in the payload. OK that COULD give some
interesting results, but not so much as a humble MICROSCOPE DAMM IT!


According to Wikipedia, the SHERLOC context imager has a resolution of
better than 30 micrometers. Not quite a microscope, depending on your
definition of such instruments. Chemical and mineral composition
measurements have a resolution better than 100 micrometers.

Terrestrial bacteria are typically a few micrometers in size, so SHERLOC
would not resolve single cells, but could detect clumps of some hundreds
of cells by their composition.

--
Niklas Holsti
niklas holsti tidorum fi
. @ .