Mars Rovers: Oops, We Destroyed Evidence of Life on Mars

So we keep sending these Mars rovers up to Mars to try to find evidence of life, but we’ve come up empty-handed so far.  In fact, we’ve found no organic molecules at all, though these should appear in the planet’s composition even if only deposited there by asteroids and comets.  But now we may know why:

Then last year, NASA’s Phoenix lander, which also failed to detect organics on Mars, stumbled on something in the Martian soil that may have, in effect, been hiding the organics: a class of chemicals called perchlorates.

At low temperatures, perchlorates are relatively harmless. But when heated to hundreds of degrees Celsius they release a lot of oxygen, which tends to cause any nearby combustible material to burn. For that very reason, perchlorates are used in rocket propulsion.

The Phoenix and Viking landers looked for organic molecules by heating soil samples to similarly high temperatures to evaporate them and analyse them in gas form.

That’s right: the Mars rovers burned the Christmas hen.  

Proof?

When Douglas Ming of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and colleagues tried heating organics and perchlorates like this on Earth, the resulting combustion left no trace of organics behind.

Now I don’t know too much about astrophysics, but I do know that there’s a reason the kids who put hamsters in the microwave had to go to a special school.  It’s because when life molecules get really hot, they tend to become destroyed.  So maybe we could try finding life by not incinerating it next time?

Jeffrey Bada of the University of California, San Diego, agrees that a new approach is needed. He is leading work on a new instrument called Urey for the European Space Agency’s ExoMars rover, due to launch in 2016, which will be able to detect organic material at concentrations as low as a few parts per trillion. The good news is that, although Urey heats its samples, it does so in water, so the organics cannot burn up.

Great!  Glad to hear we’ll get it right this time!  Why don’t you tell the good news to the $1.4+ billion spent on Mars exploration so far?

I don’t need to point out that when our rovers go up there and burn down Martian cities, it makes the Martians very, very angry.

Source: New Scientist.