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Evidence of freshwater lake that could have supported microbial life on Mars
- alooPotato 13y agoDoes anyone know whether Curiosity has the tools/systems to detect whether life exists on Mars now?
- swamp40 13y agoOfficially, no it wasn't built to detect life. But there are cameras all over the thing. So if something is scurrying around leaving tracks or skeletons, we should be able to see that just fine. Or if it rolls up on a flower or a tree, that ought to be pretty obvious.
- blacksmith_tb 13y agoA bit trickier with microbial life, though. Though it wouldn't be impossible for it to bump into a stromatolite, say.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoNot exactly. It was not specifically designed for detecting life, but it has a lot of instruments that could provide enormously strong evidence for life. For example, if you took a pile of mulch and put it through Curiosity's SAM instrument suite you could look at the data coming out of it and go "yup, that's a bunch of wood chips, unquestionably". But that would require quite a bit of luck. If there are only extremely small amounts of materials of biogenic origin Curiosity is unlikely to be able to definitively identify them.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoTitle is a reach. What about this lake made it especially appropriate for supporting life? Nothing that any body of water would have. More accurate: 'Evidence of freshwater lake; water is essential ingredient in supporting life'
- InclinedPlane 13y agoNeutral pH, fresh water (not brackish), moderate temperatures. That's pretty exceptional anywhere in the Solar System that isn't Earth.
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoGiven RNA molecules we find on crashed asteroids, I think it is foregone conclusion that at very least there was once microbial life on Mars.
- Nogwater 13y agoWe've found RNA on asteroids? Not just amino acids?
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoRNA molecules, not strands.