Nasa Rover on Mars Detects Puff of Gas That Hints at Possibility of Life

They do sterilize spacecraft before sending them to mars, that's a real thing. I believe we'd very carefully sterilize humans spacesuits and ships before sending them. I think the likely outcome of this is blind indifference to the importance of discovering life on another plan. No increase in Nasa budgets or plans for discovery.

it sounds like a technicality in the scope if the instrumentation. I'd assume that if you can find the building blocks of life, you can guide and establish the next set of tests. I assume that if there is life, the current test would pass and by being broad it has a better chance at getting a hit if it's there.

My best guess: it's much cheaper and more reliable to start with detecting building blocks before investing in detecting life.

I think this is at least partly a political decision. If you bill your new rover as having a mission to find life, then you can fail pretty spectacularly when you don't. Open-ended chemistry testing is more likely to succeed at least partially, and the public won't care or try to interpret results.

Because you get public support, and hence funding, as long as you search for life. Not sure that anyone at those organizations cares about that question, it looks more like an obsession of the public and the media.

You can only carry a certain amount of instruments at a time, so you want to start off broad, then send incrementally more specific detectors as you identify things that are interesting. An 'is this definitely life?' experiment will probably not be sent until we have some very good likely candidates and the mission will probably be to get samples back off planet and into to a earth or LEO lab (depending on paranoia) where in depth experiments can be put together in person without the brutal restrictions on equipment that come with extra terrestrial rovers.

Because even if life exists, we do not yet know where to look for it, or what we would be looking for. The surface is bombarded by UV and radiation, so very unlikely. Should we look in cliff shadows? Near ice deposits? The bottoms of craters? Near the equator where it is warmer? Or near the poles where there might be water? We could look a long time without ever learning whether or not life exists.

Instead, we look for things associated with life. Methane can be produced by life, so let's see where it's coming from first and then worry about whether we can send a probe there. Maybe look for organic molecules, then try to see if there is a trail to life. Try to figure out where on Mars liquid water exists, since that is a prerequisite for life as we know it.

And in the meantime, there's plenty of basic science to be done. Geology teaches us about what Mars was like a long time ago. That too can give us a hint towards whether life was possible, and where. Understanding the atmosphere and its routine seasonal swings helps us understand the environment so that later, when looking for life, we don't get excited and confuse a weather phenomena with evidence of life.

Lastly, physics of our probes dictates where we can send them. For our best, heaviest probes, we don't have room on the rocket for a lot of fuel to slow down. So sites need to have low elevation to give parachutes a chance to slow us down. If we want the probe to be powered by solar, we need to be near the equator. Even if not powered by solar, we probably want to avoid being near the poles where winter can last a whole Earth year.

I think that this is because people want to answer the question definitively. Currently there is not enough information to create a strong consensus on the tests and evidence required to say that there is / is not life present. The idea of the exploratory program is to move to a point where the community says : we need to do x and then that will settle this pretty clearly. Then we can do x.

Because it's hard. Seriously. Go somewhere dry and grab a handful of dirt that contains no macroscopic biomass. A construction site with a big mound of just-exhumed dirt, maybe. Now... prove it's got "life" in it. I mean, it surely does, right? How do you do that?

You could try throwing it under a microscope, but environments like that have very few actual organisms per mass. You're looking for a needle in a haystack of tiny rocks.

One way that does work is that you take it to a lab, treat it appropriately to extract the soluble DNA or RNA and then dump the results into a giant PCR machine to sequence whatever comes out. The reaction amplifies whatever might be there, so you're guaranteed to get a partial sequence, which you can then match to a database of known organisms and see if you found anything new. In fact this is a real technique and new microbes are discovered regularly doing this.

Now put all that stuff on a 1000kg spacecraft.

The point is that you don't just "design a spacecraft to answer the question of whether there is life on Mars today". It's expensive, and you have to match your science to your budget. These instruments looking for biochemistry are a valid and useful first step.

No one seriously believes the recent UFO nonsense is actually aliens, except for a clueless representative in congress that keeps pushing for these reports.

Curious why that would be "dreadful" and I thought most assumed there is most likely water and life on mars (microbial that is), but just under the surface and with the unimaginable number of planets assuming we are the only planet with life would probably be similar to the early thinking the sun resolves around the earth.

The surface of Mars is very hostile to life.

The extreme radiation, extremely low pressure, extreme cold, anoxic atmosphere, soil toxicity, and almost total lack of humidity make it highly unlikely any earth bacteria could survive for long on the surface.

If there is life it is buried under metres of rock and/or ice, probably in areas of hydrothermal activity.

There is natural exchange of material between earth and mars from large asteroid strikes. So - the question isn't really about cross contamination as we know that has happened at scale fairly recently, but really is there a functioning ecology that runs independently ?

Mass of Mars robot, 500 kg?

Mass of Kola drill platform? 100 000 tons?