![]() Present life would give itself away via the sheer quantity and good state of preservation of the biomolecules, says Vago. ![]() When it comes semantics at a hypothetical post-detection press conference, he says that rather than ‘this was/is life,’ official statements are more likely to read: ‘Currently, the only explanation for our results is life we could not think of any other way to produce our findings.’ Will MOMA be able to differentiate between past and present life? We need both sides for a consistent interpretation, he says. The optimists will declare to have seen evidence for life while the pessimists will carefully search for non-biological explanations, says Goesmann. While the identification of molecules will most likely contain little ambiguity, the significance for “life detection” is tricky, he says. What is MOMA’s biggest scientific challenge?Ĭonverting results into significance, Fred Goesmann, MOMA’s Principal Investigator, and a planetary scientist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute in Gottingen, told me via email. The probability that we may find something that is suggestive of life is something like 50%, he says. The probability that we will find organic molecules, I think is like 100%, says Vago. This will enable the team to avoid sample contamination by perchlorates, colorless and odorless salts, that can be an unwanted byproduct of the kind of heat needed to conduct such sample analysis. Instead of thermal heat, MOMA will use a laser to separate the largest organic compounds from the minerals to which they were originally bound. Then these gas phase chemical samples will undergo onboard analysis to determine if they look promising for biology in both their makeup and their distribution. To do so, MOMA will either use heat or ultraviolet laser pulses to convert chemical species in the samples into a gas phase. Mass spectrometers measure the chemical makeup and mass of given substances in gaseous states. MOMA must first vaporize the compounds it collects so they can be detected by the instrument’s mass spectrometer. Dig a foot and a half below the surface and the temperature is minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit it's a wonderful freezer, he says. Once Mars lost its surface water, it turned very cold, says Vago. The ensuing cold temperatures beneath the surface would also have aided in their preservation. ![]() Once Mars lost its water and dried out, these microbial colonies would have turned into microfossils preserved by this sedimentary ash. Because Mars is thought to have been very volcanically active at the time, ash from its volcanoes would have fallen on its ocean’s surface. Some four billion years ago, it’s likely there were microbial colonies living in some sort of hydrothermal system beneath the surface of Oxia Planum. ![]()
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