(ORDO NEWS) — New scientific work has shown that even the most modern rovers, contrary to the original plan, do not have the necessary sensitivity of instruments to detect Martian life. Moreover, even earthly.
Starting in the 1970s, people stopped flying to other celestial bodies. The projects of flight to Mars developed by von Braun and Korolev remained unclaimed.
At the same time, scientists wanted to find out somehow whether there is life on the fourth planet of our system, or at least whether it was there in the past.
It is difficult to do this with the help of instruments. For a human biologist, identifying traces of life is often quite simple – even in the Atacama Desert there are a number of undoubted markers of life.
However, sending a biologist to Mars is still unrealistic, and drawing the same conclusion with a limited set of instruments is a much less trivial task.
In the 1970s, the American Viking lander landed on the Red Planet. He also had devices designed to search for life.
But big problems were revealed: in particular, the methods for detecting traces of life used by the apparatus required temperatures that automatically destroyed any microorganism in samples of the Martian soil.
That is, devices for searching for life could not detect life in principle, because they would kill it.
Since then, researchers working with NASA have been constantly working hard to make the next generation of analysis instruments less inoperable.
It was believed that they were already quite effective for the Curiosity rover, and even more so for the later Perseverance.
The point is not only that the instruments of both rovers have so far found only the simplest organic molecules.
The authors of the study tried the tools for rovers – both existing and promising ones – in terrestrial conditions to understand how much they can detect life at least where it definitely exists.
Scientists have tested these instruments in Chile’s Atacama Desert, on deposits formed 100-160 million years ago.
Geologically, they are similar to the vicinity of the Lake crater on Mars, which Perseverance is currently studying.
First, samples from the area were studied using standard biological equipment used by Earth scientists in their daily work.
As a result, as expected, it was possible to find traces of many ancient microorganisms. Although most of their species could not be identified accurately.
Then they tried to do the same work with the instruments used by the rovers.
It turned out that they could hardly identify some of the molecular signatures of life on the surface of the Atacama at the very limit of their sensitivity.
The footprints were so unexpressed that, if they were found by a real rover, it would not be possible to talk about unequivocal evidence of life.
Conclusion? The authors state: if there was life on Mars, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to reliably find traces of it.
Interestingly, this applies not only to the current planetary rovers, but also to the ExoMars, which the Europeans only plan to deliver to the Red Planet sometime in the late 2020s.
It should be noted here that, in comparison with Atacama, on the surface of Mars, the level of ultraviolet radiation (there is no ozone layer) and cosmic radiation is much higher (on Earth, it is stopped by a dense atmosphere and magnetic field).
Both destroy complex organics at a depth of up to half a meter in a matter of millions of years.
Therefore, if traces of organics were found in the Atacama “at the limit of possibilities”, then on Mars it will be beyond the capabilities of the corresponding instruments.
Scientists conclude that discovering life on Mars – or disproving its existence – requires bringing soil samples to Earth so they can be studied in traditional biological laboratories.
At the same time, it must be understood that no more than tens or hundreds of grams of alien soil can be returned from the Red Planet using existing types of rockets.
On such a small sample, even for the Atacama, it is difficult to unambiguously detect life. Moreover, it will be difficult for the Martian soil.
Previously, Naked Science noted that an unambiguous solution to the question of whether there is life on Mars, using only machines, is unattainable.
To do this, they need intelligence, which (despite the hype around AI in the media), real robots of all types do not currently have.
How to create it is not yet clear, since the only known intelligence (human) can only be confidently said that it is not built on an algorithmic basis.
At the same time, all known computers are based precisely on the algorithmic principle, and no others in this area are known (or even proposed).
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