NASA promotes the non-discovery of life on Mars by Perseverance
It’s all a game!
In what can only be called a kabuki theater stunt, NASA today held a press conference and issued a press release promoting what is essentially the non-discovery of life on Mars by the science team operating the rover Perseverance.
Agency officials, led by acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy, proudly claimed the discovery justified the oft-stated goal of Perseverance, to find life on Mars.
“This finding by Perseverance, launched under President Trump in his first term, is the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars. The identification of a potential biosignature on the Red Planet is a groundbreaking discovery, and one that will advance our understanding of Mars,” said acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy.
This is all garbage. First, Perseverance’s real objective has never been to find life on Mars. It is there to study the planet’s geology. If it should happen to detect a biosignature that would be great, but doing so has always been highly unlikely.
Second, the discovery that Duffy touts is itself quite underwhelming. The key quote from the press release that immediately precedes Duffy’s claim is very telling:
A potential biosignature is a substance or structure that might have a biological origin but requires more data or further study before a conclusion can be reached about the absence or presence of life.
Furthermore, the biosignature that Duffy touts is actually not really a biosignature. They found “a distinct pattern of minerals” that might be sometimes be related to life processes, but not always.
The combination of these minerals, which appear to have formed by electron-transfer reactions between the sediment and organic matter, is a potential fingerprint for microbial life, which would use these reactions to produce energy for growth. The minerals also can be generated abiotically, or without the presence of life. [emphasis mine]
In other words, the data is very uncertain. It certainly doesn’t merit the loud push NASA and Duffy is giving it.
I suspect this push is the result of NASA’s fundamental lie about Perseverance’s so-called search for life, a lie that can never really be fulfilled. It is also related to hiding Perseverance’s limited capabilities. For example, Curiosity has a small lab allowing scientists to analyze samples in great detail. If Curiosity came across a real biosignature, it would be able to identify it.
Perseverance lacks this ability, because in its stead it has equipment for preserving core samples for later pick-up. All it really was designed to do was to gather those core samples. It can’t really do the same kind of ground analysis as Curiosity.
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 print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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
It’s all a game!
In what can only be called a kabuki theater stunt, NASA today held a press conference and issued a press release promoting what is essentially the non-discovery of life on Mars by the science team operating the rover Perseverance.
Agency officials, led by acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy, proudly claimed the discovery justified the oft-stated goal of Perseverance, to find life on Mars.
“This finding by Perseverance, launched under President Trump in his first term, is the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars. The identification of a potential biosignature on the Red Planet is a groundbreaking discovery, and one that will advance our understanding of Mars,” said acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy.
This is all garbage. First, Perseverance’s real objective has never been to find life on Mars. It is there to study the planet’s geology. If it should happen to detect a biosignature that would be great, but doing so has always been highly unlikely.
Second, the discovery that Duffy touts is itself quite underwhelming. The key quote from the press release that immediately precedes Duffy’s claim is very telling:
A potential biosignature is a substance or structure that might have a biological origin but requires more data or further study before a conclusion can be reached about the absence or presence of life.
Furthermore, the biosignature that Duffy touts is actually not really a biosignature. They found “a distinct pattern of minerals” that might be sometimes be related to life processes, but not always.
The combination of these minerals, which appear to have formed by electron-transfer reactions between the sediment and organic matter, is a potential fingerprint for microbial life, which would use these reactions to produce energy for growth. The minerals also can be generated abiotically, or without the presence of life. [emphasis mine]
In other words, the data is very uncertain. It certainly doesn’t merit the loud push NASA and Duffy is giving it.
I suspect this push is the result of NASA’s fundamental lie about Perseverance’s so-called search for life, a lie that can never really be fulfilled. It is also related to hiding Perseverance’s limited capabilities. For example, Curiosity has a small lab allowing scientists to analyze samples in great detail. If Curiosity came across a real biosignature, it would be able to identify it.
Perseverance lacks this ability, because in its stead it has equipment for preserving core samples for later pick-up. All it really was designed to do was to gather those core samples. It can’t really do the same kind of ground analysis as Curiosity.
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 print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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
Minor edit in first sentence: “kabuki theater”
Hello Bob.
I am starting to wonder if there is some unpublished statutory requirement that every NASA administrator must at some point in his term make some splashy announcement that signs of life have been (sort of, not really) discovered by NASA rovers on Mars.
Richard M: Heh. I think your theory has merit.
I am increasingly regretting the decision to pull Isaacman’s nomination. Duffy has done some good things, but he also appears strongly wedded to the old ways. I suspect he is part of the reason SLS and Orion are surviving so well. I also think he will let Artemis-2 fly manned around the Moon, something that any sane person aware of the facts would question highly.
I heard Don Imus once watched Carrot Top perform while wearing a Kabuki mask, but got in trouble when he called it a happy-headed Noh
(runs)
If the findings of the Perseverance science team are correct, this sample could prove that life evolved on a planet beyond Earth. Return of this sample to Earth for study in a state-of-the-art lab should be a priority for the U.S. space program.
This finding is actually quite impressive. Is it conclusive evidence of past life? No. Is it very, VERY compelling, yes. Surely it isn’t worthy of the diminishment in Bob Zimmerman’s article. Everyone that I talked to at LPSC about this thought it was very compelling. We really need to bring it back (as David Spencer wrote in his comment) to be sure.
Bill Farrand: I guess we will have to agree to disagree. I don’t dispute that the finding is intriguing, but I think it is being greatly over sold. We are presently in budget negotiations where NASA faces large cuts. Press releases like this are just the kind of thing NASA always does during those negotiations. And every single time it does so, we eventually learn the claims were not so great in retrospect.
And in this case, the uncertainties are large. Lots of “mights”, “could bes,” and “maybes” in the release.
Mars Return is in trouble, so they push the results and “we have to get those rocks back here!”
It’s another budget fight.
It used to be the discovery of water JPL announced every six weeks hoping someone would bite.
Hoagland did better ;)
Bob Zimmerman, I’m not a geochemist, but as I understand it there was reduction of sulfates to sulfides in the mudstone and for the chemistry present for this to have occurred abiotically would have required unreasonably high temperatures or unreasonably long (even by geological time standards) reaction times. Biological processes are actually the more likely option here. I can’t comment on press releases and such but just based on the science, this is an exciting discovery and shouldn’t be belittled.