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Is this some kind of job security on NASA's part? The unspoken goal of these mars missions has always been to find life, so why not make sure the rover has ever

by zyb09 14y ago

Is this some kind of job security on NASA's part? The unspoken goal of these mars missions has always been to find life, so why not make sure the rover has every possible piece of equipment to do so. Unless they want to send another one. They certainly have good arguments for the pitch now.

jbri 14y ago
This brings to mind an old adage about eggs and baskets. More seriously, adding extra components to a mission means many more man-hours designing, testing and vetting the extra functionality, and also adds a boatload of extra weight, which makes the entire thing massively more risky and expensive (especially with the rover's at-the-time-unproven landing mechanism). There's no real need to send everything at once, especially if a lot of what you're sending could be ruled out as entirely unnecessary depending on the results of other tests you're carrying out.
meric 14y ago
Perhaps every possible equipment is not possible given current funding; It could be a trade-off between probability of detecting possible indicators of life (organic compounds) and ability to detect more certain indicators of life (actual examples of life). Imagine if you were only allowed to purchase $100 of equipment - it could either be a digital camera that can take pictures of fossils and definitively prove life exists on Mars once and for all, which is less likely than, a piece of equipment that detects the presence of methane in the atmosphere. (more likely but less definitive proof).
- Spooky23 14y ago
  I think to the lay public, it feels like an excruciating process to announce that there is life on Mars. The way NASA communicates to the public makes it tough. If a troupe of green martians wearing tophats and kilts started doing the "Lord of the Dance" routine in front of the rover, NASA would announce "We are still awaiting test results, but we believe that the Curiosity rover may have discovered organic materials that resemble felt that resembles something that could potentially be a hat."
InclinedPlane 14y ago
If only it were that easy. Curiosity already is a $2.5 billion roving science lab, quite literally. However, it's necessary to have a guiding principle for what you set out to investigate when you decide what equipment to bring to Mars, and in the case of Curiosity that principle has been mineralogy and chemical composition. Overwhelmingly, Curiosity's instruments are designed to be able to determine the mineral makeup of rocks and the chemical makeup of samples. This gives it the possibility of discovering hints of life if it gets lucky, but overall it's not very good at that role. Partly this is because we still need to know about the mineralogy of Mars, there is a ton we don't know. Improving on that knowledge will mean that we are all that much more able to target the regions of Mars that are more likely to harbor or have harbored life. And then we can send a "life detection" class mission. However, such missions aren't easy. Consider a few of the challenges. In order to determine the composition of a rock you really don't care about the extreme minority constituents of that rock. If you can figure out what the elemental composition of the rock is within, say, 1% that can be a good day. However, if you want to determine whether or not a sample of dirt contains living or formerly living microbes then you are talking about a teeny, tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent of the material. Which means that you don't just need to break down the material into its major parts, you need to figure out how to focus in your studies to just that small bit of biological material. Which could mean extremely high magnification microscopes, for example, though that has a throughput problem. Or it could mean making use of various experiments to prove the existence of running metabolic activities within living organisms, such as using radiologically tagged nutrients, for example. But these sorts of things are pretty much a crap-shoot, and wouldn't help if the biological samples are no longer living. Also, a NASA life detection mission requires much higher standards of clean-room assembly and pre-launch sterilization, which add expense and complication to the mission.
- debacle 14y ago
  If life does indeed exist on Mars, how likely is it that we could detect the difference between clean room contamination and actual life?
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago

by zyb09 14y ago

jbri 14y ago

This brings to mind an old adage about eggs and baskets. More seriously, adding extra components to a mission means many more man-hours designing, testing and vetting the extra functionality, and also adds a boatload of extra weight, which makes the entire thing massively more risky and expensive (especially with the rover's at-the-time-unproven landing mechanism). There's no real need to send everything at once, especially if a lot of what you're sending could be ruled out as entirely unnecessary depending on the results of other tests you're carrying out.

meric 14y ago

Perhaps every possible equipment is not possible given current funding; It could be a trade-off between probability of detecting possible indicators of life (organic compounds) and ability to detect more certain indicators of life (actual examples of life). Imagine if you were only allowed to purchase $100 of equipment - it could either be a digital camera that can take pictures of fossils and definitively prove life exists on Mars once and for all, which is less likely than, a piece of equipment that detects the presence of methane in the atmosphere. (more likely but less definitive proof).

Spooky23 14y ago
I think to the lay public, it feels like an excruciating process to announce that there is life on Mars. The way NASA communicates to the public makes it tough. If a troupe of green martians wearing tophats and kilts started doing the "Lord of the Dance" routine in front of the rover, NASA would announce "We are still awaiting test results, but we believe that the Curiosity rover may have discovered organic materials that resemble felt that resembles something that could potentially be a hat."

InclinedPlane 14y ago

If only it were that easy. Curiosity already is a $2.5 billion roving science lab, quite literally. However, it's necessary to have a guiding principle for what you set out to investigate when you decide what equipment to bring to Mars, and in the case of Curiosity that principle has been mineralogy and chemical composition. Overwhelmingly, Curiosity's instruments are designed to be able to determine the mineral makeup of rocks and the chemical makeup of samples. This gives it the possibility of discovering hints of life if it gets lucky, but overall it's not very good at that role. Partly this is because we still need to know about the mineralogy of Mars, there is a ton we don't know. Improving on that knowledge will mean that we are all that much more able to target the regions of Mars that are more likely to harbor or have harbored life. And then we can send a "life detection" class mission. However, such missions aren't easy. Consider a few of the challenges. In order to determine the composition of a rock you really don't care about the extreme minority constituents of that rock. If you can figure out what the elemental composition of the rock is within, say, 1% that can be a good day. However, if you want to determine whether or not a sample of dirt contains living or formerly living microbes then you are talking about a teeny, tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent of the material. Which means that you don't just need to break down the material into its major parts, you need to figure out how to focus in your studies to just that small bit of biological material. Which could mean extremely high magnification microscopes, for example, though that has a throughput problem. Or it could mean making use of various experiments to prove the existence of running metabolic activities within living organisms, such as using radiologically tagged nutrients, for example. But these sorts of things are pretty much a crap-shoot, and wouldn't help if the biological samples are no longer living. Also, a NASA life detection mission requires much higher standards of clean-room assembly and pre-launch sterilization, which add expense and complication to the mission.

debacle 14y ago
If life does indeed exist on Mars, how likely is it that we could detect the difference between clean room contamination and actual life?
- InclinedPlane 14y ago