New Mars rover hunts for life by 'cooking' rocks
When rocks are heated up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, secrets may be revealed
NASA / JPL-Caltech
Technicians and engineers carefully install the 88-pound (40-kilogram) SAM instrument on the Curiosity rover. The picture was taken at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 6, 2011.By Elizabeth Howell
updated 2 hours 20 minutes ago 2012-07-26T23:41:15
The recipe for seeking habitability on the Red Planet using NASA's next rover will start with a pinch of Mars — either a few grains of soil or a wisp of atmosphere.
Scientists will then follow a simple recipe: Place the Martian bit into the rover's Sample Analysis of Mars (SAM) instrument, cook to up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius), then measure the result.
The new rover, Curiosity, is the centerpiece of the Mars Science Laboratory Mission, which launched in November 2011 and is due to land on Mars Aug. 6. The $2.5 billion project is aiming to learn whether Mars is, or ever was, hospitable to life.
NASA tried an experiment similar to SAM almost 40 years ago on its Viking Mars landers, and the results are still being debated today. For example, the landers' discovery of chlorine compounds in the soil was initially believed to be cleaning fluid contamination, but a 2011 study hypothesized these could have been leftovers of organic life.
SAM, says NASA, will produce far more precise results.
"The surface experiments on Viking were designed to do a home-run-swing-for-the-fences life detection experiment," said Ashwin Vasavada, MSL's deputy project scientist. "SAM is significantly more capable than Viking ... it can find much smaller molecules and it can detect things more sensitively." [11 Amazing Things NASA's Huge Mars Rover Can Do]
The microwave-size experiment package, wedged in the front of the Mini Cooper-size rover, is so complex that NASA considers SAM itself more complicated than many of its spacecraft.
.Samples inside the package must first be "cooked" in an oven, then analyzed using instruments commonly found on the shelf of respectable scientific laboratories on Earth.
"Different constituents in that sample will break down at different temperatures and become gas," said Vasavada.
Clay, Vasavada said as an example, begins to break down at 530 degrees Fahrenheit (277 degrees Celsius). Therefore, a puff of water appearing on a Martian sample cooked to that temperature would imply that it is partly made of clay.
SAM includes a gas chromatograph made up of six different tubes; each one is able to pick up a different kind of compound.