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Mars : Big Discovery In History
Tuesday, November 20, 2012 13:14
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NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has apparently made a discovery “for the history books,” but we’ll have to wait a few weeks to learn what the new Red Planet find may be, media reports suggest.
The discovery was made by Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, NPR reported today (Nov. 20). SAM is the rover’s onboard chemistry lab, and it’s capable of identifying organic compounds — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it.SAM apparently spotted something interesting in a soil sample Curiosity’s huge robotic arm delivered to the instrument recently.
“This data is gonna be one for the history books,” Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, told NPR. “It’s looking really good.”The rover team won’t be ready to announce just what SAM found for several weeks, NPR reported, as scientists want to check and double-check the results. Indeed, Grotzinger confirmed to SPACE.com that the news will come out at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, which takes place Dec. 3-7 in San Francisco.
The $2.5 billion Curiosity rover landed inside Mars’ huge Gale Crater on Aug. 5, kicking off a two-year mission to determine if Mars has ever been capable of supporting microbial life.
The car-size robot carries 10 different instruments to aid in its quest, but SAM is the rover’s heart, taking up more than half of its science payload by weight.
This is great. Can’t wait to hear what they found.
I tell you what they will say:
We think that its possible in a certain scenario hypothetically speaking, if the measures are right and there’s no defect in the equipment, plus, no interference in the communication because of some space unexplained phenomenon, if count all this, maybe we found some old vestige of a possible microbial degraded fossil.
It will be as shallow as that, they will talk and talk and talk, but won’t say anything. Do you people really believe that if they find something they will tell us??
I am waiting [with apprehension - yawnnnnnnnn] for the usual “now you see it”, “now you don’t” to play out.
I am surprised someone hasn’t hatched a website giving NASA propagandists….er, scientists some creative ways to debunk this big discovery