After a decade of "following the water," planetary scientists
want to see if water co-existed with other critical environmental
conditions that could have allowed simple forms of life to emerge.
Mars Science Laboratory, a one-ton chemistry lab on wheels set
for launch Saturday morning from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in
Florida, is geared for a unique mission.
Think "extraterrestrial real-estate appraisal," says Pamela
Conrad, an astrobiologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
We're not quite ready to hunt for life itself yet, and the MSL
rover isn't designed to do so, say researchers taking part in the
$2.5-billion mission to the red planet.
IN PICTURES: Exploring Mars
But after a decade of "following the water" - a necessary
ingredient for life as researchers currently understand it -
planetary scientists are moving to take the next critical step: see
if water co-existed with other critical environmental conditions
that could have allowed simple forms of life to emerge.
Organisms on Earth take the forms they do because they are
adapted to their environments, MSL researchers explain. If humans
eventually hunt for evidence of life itself on the Red Planet, or
anywhere else, for that matter, knowing something about the
environment organisms inhabit will yield clues about what the
organisms were or are like.
"If a Tim Allen, 'Galaxy Quest,' alien rock creature were to come
up and bang us on the head, we don't want to ignore it. That would
be the 'Ah ha!' moment we'd regret having missed," says Steve
Brenner, director of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution
in Gainesville, Fla.
For Mars, the incremental Holy Grail is finding organic carbon,
the stuff of complex molecules that form the building blocks for
life, according to John Grotzinger, a planetary scientist at the
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and the
mission's project scientist.
"It's a long shot, but we're going to try," he said during a
prelaunch briefing this week..
Meteorites deposit organic compounds on the Martian surface all
the time, but today's conditions are so harsh that the compounds are
quickly destroyed, he explains.
Finding organic carbon captured in the layered rocks that the
rover Curiosity will explore would indicate that at the time the
layers were deposited, conditions on the surface at that location
could well have been far more benign, allowing organic compounds to
exist at the surface.
Set for launch at 10:02 a.m. Eastern Standard Time Saturday,
Curiosity holds a TripTik that sets the rover into Mars' Gale Crater
The oversized ding in Mars' crust is 96 miles across, about 3
miles deep, and sports a gently sloping mountain in its center that
rises to a height comparable to California's Mt. Whitney, the
highest peak in the lower 48 states.
Some researchers crudely estimate the impact crater's age at
between 3.5 billion and 3.8 billion years old.
After peering at images and sifting through mineral-composition
data gathered from various orbiters circling Mars, mission planners
settled on the crater and the mountain that vaults from its center
because the crater walls and outcrops on the mountain's slopes bear
Grand Canyon-like bands of different rock layers.
Clays are abundant at the mountain's base, testifying to a
prolonged wet environment, Dr. …