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My February birthday fund-raising campaign for this website, Behind the Black, is now over. Despite a relatively weak initial three weeks, the last week was spectacular, making this campaign the second best ever.

 

Thanks to every person who donated or subscribed. It continues to astonish me that people who can read my work for free like it enough to donate money voluntarily. Words cannot express my appreciation for that support, especially in these uncertain times.

 

If you have been a regular reader and a fan of my work and have not yet donated or subscribed, please consider doing so. I take no ads, I keep the website clean from pop-ups and annoying demands (most of the time). Thus, I depend entirely on my readers to support me. Though this means I am sacrificing some income, it also means that I remain entirely independent from outside pressure. By depending solely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, no one can threaten me with censorship. You don't like what I write, you can simply go elsewhere.

 

You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

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Curiosity finds evidence of complex carbon molecules

In a study released today, the Curiosity science team announced that earlier drill samples revealed evidence of complex organic carbon molecules, the possible remains of past life.

To unlock organic molecules from the samples, the oven baked them to temperatures of between 600°C and 860°C—the range where a known contaminant disappeared—and fed the resulting fumes to a mass spectrometer, which can identify molecules by weight. The team picked up a welter of closely related organic signals reflecting dozens or hundreds of types of small carbon molecules, probably short rings and strands called aromatics and aliphatics, respectively. Only a few of the organic molecules, sulfur-bearing carbon rings called thiophenes, were abundant enough to be detected directly, Eigenbrode says.

The mass patterns looked like those generated on Earth by kerogen, a goopy fossil fuel building block that is found in rocks such as oil shale—a result the team tested by baking and breaking organic molecules in identical instruments on Earth, at Goddard. Kerogen is sometimes found with sulfur, which helps preserve it across billions of years; the Curiosity scientists think the sulfur compounds in their samples also explain the longevity of the Mars compounds.

Earth’s kerogen was formed when geologic forces compressed the ancient remains of algae and similar critters. It’s impossible to say whether ancient life explains the martian organics, however. Carbon-rich meteorites contain kerogenlike compounds, and constantly rain down on Mars. Or reactions driven by Mars’s ancient volcanoes could have formed the compounds from primordial carbon dioxide. Monica Grady, a planetary scientist at The Open University in Milton Keynes, U.K., believes the compounds somehow formed on Mars because she thinks it’s highly unlikely that the rover dug into a site where an ancient meteorite fell. She also notes that the signal was found at the base of an ancient lake, a potential catchment for life’s remains. “I suspect it’s geological. I hope it’s biological,” she says.

It must be emphasized once again that they have not found evidence of past life. What they have found are the types of molecules that are often left behind by life, but can also form without the presence of life.

This result, from past drillholes in the Murray Formation, explains however why Curiosity headed back downhill to do its most recent drill test.

Curiosity has one last tool to help the team find out: nine small cups containing a solvent that frees organic compounds bonded in rock, eliminating the need to break them apart—and potentially destroy them—at high temperatures. In December 2016, rover scientists were finally prepared to use one of the cups, but just then the mechanism to extend the rover’s drill stopped working reliably. The rover began exploring an iron-rich ridge, leaving the mudstone behind. In April, after engineers found a way to fix the drill problem, the team made the rare call to go backward, driving back down the ridge to the mudstone to drill its first sample in a year and half. If the oven and mass spectrometer reveal signs of organics in the sample, the team is likely to use a cup. “It’s getting so close I can taste it,” says Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The newest drillhole sample has now entered the mass spectrometer. Stay tuned!

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

4 comments

  • Localfluff

    Great! Carbon except for as CO2 in the atmosphere has been strangely absent on Mars AFAIK. I suppose one has to brush off the dust.

  • Phill O

    “What they have found are the types of molecules that are often left behind by life, but can also form without the presence of life.”

    Much of this statement is based on an assumption that the carbon reserves are from fossils. This may not be true! One must keep an open mind.

    Try working from a model where the carbon on the solar planets were deposited during the earth’s formation. A whole different conclusions will build from this.

    Bob, the latter part of the statement is absolutely true.

  • “Milton Keynes, U.K., believes the compounds somehow formed on Mars because she thinks it’s highly unlikely that the rover dug into a site where an ancient meteorite fell.”

    Ummm… well, they’re inside a giant CRATER, sooo….

    I’m sure they knew that and discounted it, but it’s kinda a funny statement.

  • John L: Hilarious. I can’t stop laughing.

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