There may be signs of ancient life on Mars.
New research shows that some of the amino acids that could be evidence of ancient life on Mars are more susceptible to radiation than scientists thought, meaning that if they were buried deep beneath the planet's surface, they wouldn't survive.
Alexander Pavlov, a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement that their results suggest that amino acids are destroyed by Cosmic rays in the Martian surface rocks. The current Mars rover missions drill down to about two inches. It would take 20 million years to destroy all the amino acids.
It's possible that there's a sign of Mars life. The rover found organics on the red planet.
This is a short period in the development of planets and life. When you consider that the signs of life that the rovers are looking for on Mars would have been present billions of years ago, you can see why it's important.
The team discovered that the presence of liquid water, which was abundant on Mars billions of years ago, and perchlorate could have sped up the destruction of amino acids. The results of the experiment were delivered by the first one.
It appears that we aren't digging deep enough to find signs of life on Mars. Searchers could shift their focus to locations where geological processes have brought buried rock to the surface.
Recent microcraters with ages less than 10 million years or the material ejected from such craters are the types of outcrops that need to be found with shallow drill sampling.
Our planet has a strong magnetic field that makes it more hospitable to life than other planets.
The magnetosphere protects Earth's atmosphere from the solar wind and fragments of other stars by causing them to travel down magnetic-field lines.
When charged particles penetrate yards of solid rock, they can degrade or destroy organic Molecules. A planet's ability to hold on to liquid water can be affected by the amount of radiation from the sun.
The search for life on Mars will involve looking for signs of ancient biological activity in Martian rocks.
To test how effective our current search is, the team of scientists mixed several types of amino acids in a variety of materials, and then sealed the samples in test tubes under vacuum conditions.
Some of the samples were kept at temperatures similar to those on the surface of Mars, but others were kept at a lower temperature. Rocks on the Martian surface would have experienced exposure to the Cosmic-ray in 80 million years.
"Our work is the first comprehensive study where the destruction of a broad range of amino acids was studied under a variety of Mars-relevant factors and the rates of radiolysis were compared," he said. Adding silicates and perchlorates increases the rate of destruction.
The researchers haven't found any on Mars, but they have found some in meteorites. It's not clear how these chemicals formed in the Martian meteorite.
As meteorites are usually ejected from at least 1 meter below the Martian surface, this new research suggests that the amino acids may have been shielded from harsh solar radiation.
The results show that the complex organic molecule that the Mars rovers have discovered, which intrigues scientists but are not indicators of life, may have been altered by radiation exposure.
The research was published in a journal.
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