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NASA Mars Rover Captures Rock That Could Hold Fossilized Microbes
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has made what could be its most astonishing discovery to date: possible signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.
The six-wheeled robotic explorer came across an intriguing, arrow-shaped rock dubbed "Cheyava Falls" that may harbor fossilized microbes from billions of years ago, when Mars was a watery world.
Perseverance drilled into the enigmatic rock to collect a core sample on July 21, as it traversed Neretva Vallis, an ancient river valley.
The samples carefully stowed beneath the rover's belly are destined to eventually return to Earth, where they will undergo more comprehensive analysis.
"Cheyava Falls is the most puzzling, complex, and potentially important rock yet investigated by Perseverance," project scientist Ken Farley of Caltech said Thursday.
Three compelling clues have scientists buzzing.
White calcium sulfate veins run the length of the rock, a telltale sign that water once flowed through it. Between these veins is a reddish middle area, teeming with organic compounds, as detected by the rover's SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument. Finally, tiny off-white splotches ringed with black, reminiscent of leopard spots, contain chemicals that suggest energy sources for ancient microbes, according to scans by the PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) instrument.
"On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface," said David Flannery, an astrobiologist and member of the Perseverance science team from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia.
The quest to confirm ancient Martian life is far from over, however.
The real test will come when Perseverance's precious rock samples are returned to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return Program, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency slated for the 2030s.
While there are alternative explanations for these findings that do not involve microbes, there is a tantalizing chance that Perseverance's core sample might contain actual fossilized microbes—potentially making history as the first proof of life beyond Earth.
"We have zapped that rock with lasers and X-rays and imaged it literally day and night from just about every angle imaginable," said Farley.
"Scientifically, Perseverance has nothing more to give. To fully understand what really happened in that Martian river valley at Jezero Crater billions of years ago, we'd want to bring the Cheyava Falls sample back to Earth, so it can be studied with the powerful instruments available in laboratories."
NASA Rover Finds Major Surprise On Mars — And Scientists Are Excited
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
[...] "As a rock geek/scientist and as the Director of @NASAJPL — this is the kind of discovery you hope for — where mind-bending observations make your heart beat just a little faster," NASA's Laurie Leshin posted online.
"This is more than intriguing, it’s really exciting! We must bring that sample to Earth for analysis in our best labs!" Rosaly Lopes, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, wrote.
But, of course, the space agency has also tempered expectations until more is known. Non-biological processes could have created the leopard splotches, such as mineral deposits from past flows of water. In the announcement, the agency included the helpful graphic below, showing the Confidence of Life Detection scale, or CoLD. With this detection, NASA is at number one.
And, crucially, to move up the scale, the sample (from a rock named Cheyava Falls) must be closely analyzed in labs on Earth, with far more instruments than the distant, car-sized rover can carry. This can prove if non-biological factors actually formed the structures, confirm the presence of past life, rule out other hypotheses, and beyond. NASA's Mars Sample Return mission, however, is in jeopardy. It would cost around $11 billion, a price the space agency can't afford. The agency now seeks a financially feasible plan for the complex endeavor, which would retrieve samples and rocket them back to Earth.
Until then, these compelling structures will largely remain just that.
"We have zapped that rock with lasers and X-rays and imaged it literally day and night from just about every angle imaginable," said Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley. "Scientifically, Perseverance has nothing more to give. To fully understand what really happened in that Martian river valley at Jezero Crater billions of years ago, we'd want to bring the Cheyava Falls sample back to Earth, so it can be studied with the powerful instruments available in laboratories."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday July 29, @12:11PM (7 children)
just to see how the religious leaders of the world will explain that one away.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pkrasimirov on Monday July 29, @12:35PM
You cannot argue someone out of their belief if they did not arrive at that belief through logical reasoning in the first place.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday July 29, @01:37PM (3 children)
Why should they have to? When the religious texts, even the recent Book of Mormon were written, people thought planets were stars.
And they have already found water outside Earth. I don't know about the Hindus or Muslims, but the Christian Bible says nothing of other worlds, or that things on Earth can't exist outside of it. Religions, ALL religions, are about good and evil, about how to treat others.
The Jewish Bible is a history of the world from the beginning of the universe to about 400 BC when the Romans took over Israel (as had been prophesied centuries earlier).
A Black, Hispanic, or Muslim voting for Trump is like a Jew voting for Hitler
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ox0000 on Monday July 29, @04:34PM (2 children)
That is technically correct (the worst kind of correct), but that bronze-age set of rants does state (rather explicitly actually) that its deity doesn't really care about any life on other planets because those on this floating rock here were created in the image of said deity and the others were not (they don't even get a mentioning). It also doesn't really say that said deity created life anywhere else. I mean, wouldn't that be kinda important to not leave out of some divine work: "there's others out there as well, isn't space frickin' amazing?".
The point is that "life on other planets" puts the whole "we are special" or "we are unique" that is peddled by religion on even looser footing than it already is... Unless those creatures on another planet have an exactly equal religion that recognizes our floating orb as superior to theirs, I'd say that the particular religion your are referring to is bullshit - because religions tend to be XOR. Since religions make XOR claims, they cannot possibly all be correct (which would be a false equivalency fallacy), so which one is the right one? I'm erring on the side of "they're all just bullshit"(*) and sod what Pascal said.
My personal opinion of what religion is _really_ about is very different from yours. I think that religion is about creating in- and out-groups in order to effect control over the in-group by threatening members of that in-group with becoming part of the out-group, nothing more, nothing less: "you incur the same opportunity cost as I do because we both do this particular set of acts so you're a good person, this other person over there that does a different thing, because of that they are bad and you can do unspeakable things to them because of it."
Additionally, based on the behavior of (almost every single) religion, I'd be very very cautious with the claim that religion is about good or evil.
I don't think that religion has any magisterium over what is supposed to be good or evil, or morality in general...
As an atheist (anti-theist actually), I sometimes get asked "how do you not rape and murder as much as you like without religion giving you a moral compass" to which my answer is always the same: "I do all the raping and pillaging and murdering that I could ever want, the amount of which is exactly zero because I recognized those things to be destructive acts, I don't need to be told not to perform those types of acts".
Religion has never been about what is good or evil, religion has always been about control. The fact that someone would claim that religion is what dictates or gives the 'good' or 'evil' quality to actions or things is evidence of that effective level of control.
(*) Speaking of which, when discussing beliefs with adherents of mono-theistic habits, this one sometimes makes people think a bit deeper than usual: You and I are almost equally atheistic, I just happen to believe in one fewer gods than you do.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 29, @10:16PM (1 child)
I would differ with your conclusion. Many religions started out with people trying to understand, and explain the world around them. In the absence of science, almost any religion might make sense, I suppose. What you describe is how religions have been perverted over the millenia.
A MAN Just Won a Gold Medal for Punching a Woman in the Face
(Score: 2) by Ox0000 on Tuesday July 30, @02:16PM
While I appreciate what you're trying to say, it feels very much like the argument of "well, you must not be doing scrum/agile/... right". If everyone is doing it wrong, maybe there is no right way to do it using that methodology (lumping religion and agile in the same bucket here) and the methodology should be abandoned as not describing or doing anything at all.
I also don't quite agree that religion started out trying to understand the world, that process of trying to understand the world has nothing to do with religion and I would classify more as "plain curiosity".
Religion is very different from the scientific process in that religion creates dogma, it explicitly rejects how the world really works, and it explicitly does so when it conflicts with its dogma regardless of attaining a better understanding of how the world actually works.
(Score: 3, Funny) by ikanreed on Monday July 29, @05:56PM
The flow chart isn't complicated.
1. Does it vaguely resemble something in our myths if you squint a lot?
yes: It was God! This is the proof we've been waiting for! We knew it all along!
no: It was Satan! Your faith is being tested by false evidence! Who'd believe the first thing they see?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 29, @09:47PM
I'm struggling to think of how it would conflict... It's a big topic; there's probably something I can't immediately think of. Most likely not an issue beyond straw-doggin.
The closest analogy I can think of to this situation, is asking how many religions collapsed due to the discovery of weird ocean life around undersea volcanic vents? Likely a topic that never made it into a sermon LOL.
To summarize and paraphrase very poorly, last Sunday's sermon was more or less along the lines of the biblical story of Hannah shows that when randomish bad stuff happens, if you persevere, eventually the dice will roll your way. More or less a gateway topic into a more general discussion of generally keeping hope and using healthy coping mechanisms and not coping via negative techniques (feeding addictions, being a jerk, etc). Going to be hard to wedge some Mars microbes into "disproving" that sermon, LOL, and even if someone could scientifically "disprove" the story of Hannah, the leadership team at church would just LOL at the wasted effort and use some other biblical figure's story to illustrate the same topic regardless.
(Score: 5, Funny) by c0lo on Monday July 29, @12:19PM (4 children)
Was that rock so dynamically elusive? Or did it put a valiant fight? I mean, why was is captured instead of just found?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday July 29, @12:21PM
Obviously you never had a pet rock...
(Score: 4, Informative) by pkrasimirov on Monday July 29, @12:39PM
https://pokemondb.net/pokedex/geodude [pokemondb.net]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday July 29, @07:58PM
Merely finding it without capturing it would not prevent its escape to warn the other rocks by running away at geologically slow speeds.
Universal health care is so complex that only 32 of 33 developed nations have found a way to make it work.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 29, @10:24PM
Apparently so.. they had to shoot it with a laser..
Stop resisting!
(Score: 3, Informative) by mcgrew on Monday July 29, @01:29PM
Even bigger words than "if".
A Black, Hispanic, or Muslim voting for Trump is like a Jew voting for Hitler