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Ancient Mars could have supported primitive life, NASA says



 
 
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Old March 15th 13, 02:15 AM posted to bit.listserv.skeptic,sci.astro
Garrison Hilliard
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Default Ancient Mars could have supported primitive life, NASA says

It's official: Primitive life could have lived on ancient Mars, NASA says.

A sample of Mars drilled from a rock by NASA's Curiosity
roverhttp://www.space.com/17963-mars-curiosity.html and
then studied by onboard instruments "shows ancient Mars could have
supported living microbes," NASA officials announced Tuesday in a
statement
and press conference.

'A fundamental question for this mission is whether Mars could have
supported a habitable environment. From what we know now, the answer is
yes.'

- Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program

The discovery comes just seven months after the Curiosity rover landed on
Mars to spend at least two years determining if the planet could have ever
supported primitive life.

"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 at the agency's headquarters in
Washington.
"From what we know now, the answer is yes." [The Search for Life on Mars
(Photo
Timeline)http://www.space.com/16877-mars-life-search-photo-timeline.html
]

Curiosity drilled into a
rockhttp://www.space.com/19958-mars-rover-eats-rock-powder.html on
Feb. 8, boring 2.5 inches into an outcrop called John Klein using its
arm-mounted hammering drill, going deeper than any robot had ever dug into
the Red Planet before. Two weeks later, the rover transferred the
resulting gray powder samples into two onboard instruments called
Chemistry
and Mineralogy (CheMin) and Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM.

CheMin and SAM identified some of the key chemical ingredients for life in
this powder, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and
carbon. The fine-grained John Klein rock also contains clay minerals,
suggesting a long-ago aqueous environment that was salty and neutral,
researchers said
Analysis of the samples was complicated by a computer glitch that's still
affecting Curiosity today.

In late February, Curiosity's handlers determined that a glitch had
affected the flash memory on the rover's main, or A-side, computer system.
So they swapped the rover over to its backup (B-side) computer, which
caused the robot to go into a protective "safe mode" on Feb. 28.

Curiosity emerged from this safe mode on March 2, only to be put on
standby
briefly once again a few days later to wait out a Mars-bound solar
eruption. Full science operations have yet to resume, but Curiosity's
B-side computer is working well as engineers continue to work through the
mysterious problem with the A-side, team members said.

"These tests have provided us with a great deal of information about the
rover's A-side memory," Jim Erickson, Curiosity deputy project manager at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement.
"We have been able to store new data in many of the memory locations
previously affected and believe more runs will demonstrate more memory is
available."

Engineers plan to upload two software patches later this week, then
reassess when full mission operations can resume, officials said.

Curiosity landed inside Mars' huge Gale Crater onAug. 5, kicking off a
two-year prime surface mission to determine if the Red Planet has ever
been
able to support microbial
lifehttp://www.space.com/17135-life-on-mars.html.
CheMin and SAM are two of the 10 instruments it carries to aid this
quest.

While Curiosity has already made a number of interesting discoveries near
its landing site continuously for thousands of years interesting deposits
at the base of Mount Sharp, which rises 3 miles from
Gale's Center.


Read mo
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/...#ixzz2NLtcZMYd

 




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