Drill down (9/15/22)

Happy Thursday. Last night, onlookers in the UK witnessed a huge, green fireball streak across the sky. Though some guessed that it might be a piece of space debris reentering the atmosphere, analysis is showing that it was just a regular old meteor. Still, the 20-second blaze seems like it was a spectacular sight to see.

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Digging Deeper for Life on Mars

NASA’s Perseverance rover is currently trekking through an ancient river delta on the Red Planet, searching for signs of life.

As it journeys through the great rocky wasteland, here and there, the rover is taking small samples of Mars rocks a few centimeters deep and storing them in little metal tubes. But our favorite little Martian traveler may not be digging far enough to find the markers of extant life on the Red Planet.

Biomolecules are organic molecules that are integral to some biological processes, and include lipids, proteins, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids. In the upper layers of Martian regolith, biomolecules are probably too distorted by millennia of constant UV radiation to be identifiable these days. Hope remains, though, for those signs of life that could reside a meter or two beneath the surface.

A study published last week in Science Advances exposed seven kinds of biomolecules and some extreme environment-loving organisms to a harsh, Mars-like radiation environment on the side of the ISS for a year and a half.

The researchers at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) found that even when exposed to prolonged Martian-ish levels of radiation, certain biomolecules remained intact enough to be identifiable. Plus, a little protection beneath layers of rock and dust went a long way to keep the biomolecules in shape.

Measuring the remains: The study’s researchers used a Raman spectrometer, which can suss out the structure of individual molecules. Raman spectrometers are used widely in mineralogy to reveal chemical bond structures. Best of all? This is the instrumentation that Perseverance is currently using.

“We got a number of results where we were really able to see that some of the selected biomolecules are detectable, and some of the organisms are also still alive," Jean-Pierre de Vera, the principal investigator on the project, told Parallax.

So, scientists still see a glimmer of hope in the search for signs of life on Mars. “The experts say, ‘Okay, these molecules cannot be stable with this kind of radiation you've had outside the atmosphere for years,’” said de Vera. “‘They must be completely destroyed.’ But they were not completely destroyed.”

Our robot helpers

As we speak, Perseverance is sticking to its mission on the faraway surface of Mars. Though researchers might be out of luck if they’re looking for biomolecules in the top few centimeters of Martian regolith, it’s possible the rover will strike gold with other signs of life, such as fossilized remains. We won’t know for sure until the mid-2030s, when NASA and ESA plan to bring the samples home for more detailed study.

Drill baby drill

For a better shot at finding biomolecules, researchers will have to look deeper.

ESA is currently planning its own Mars rover mission, ExoMars, that will be able to drill two meters into the rocky surface to gather samples that have been better protected from UV radiation. The Europeans hoped to launch the mission this year, but ExoMars’s timetable—and future—now hangs in the balance. Roscosmos had been the mission’s launcher, and since Western payloads aren’t flying on Soyuz rockets, ExoMars doesn’t have a ride to space.

Looking further: The investigation is not yet done, according to de Vera and Mickael Baqué, lead authors of the paper. Their first experiment lasted a year and a half—a far cry from the billions of years of radiation that have bombarded the surface of the Red Planet. Follow-up studies will attempt to model biomolecule degradation over much longer stretches of time, figuring out just how deep our robots might have to dig to find a pristine sample.

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Other News from the Cosmos

• Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s science mission directorate for the past six years, announced that he plans to resign from his post in December.

• CAPSTONE, a small probe testing out a unique lunar orbit for NASA’s planned Gateway station, is currently tumbling through space in safe mode after a problematic course correction maneuver.

• LICIACube—the Italian-built selfie cam that will document the DART mission smashing into an asteroid—has successfully departed from the main spacecraft.

• Saturn has surpassed Jupiter in moon count after observers identified 20 more moons in its orbit. That brings Saturn’s moon tally to 82, beating Jupiter’s measly 79.

• Planets residing close to certain supernovae are often pretty good at avoiding engulfment, according to a recent study from UC Santa Cruz.

• The Moon inherited the noble gasses helium and neon from the Earth’s mantle, a new study in Science Advances found, lending credence to the theory that the satellite was formed by a collision between the Earth and another celestial body.

Reflections

🌌 Too many to count: This might come as a surprise, but the universe is really big and home to galaxies on galaxies. Wayyy more than we thought. Estimates of the number of galaxies in the universe have increased over the past decade alone from 170 billion to two trillion, and now scientists think the real number lies somewhere between 6 and 20 trillion. For Big Think, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explored how scientists guess at the size of the universe, and how they’re constantly striving to improve those guesses.

👽 In memoriam: Frank Drake, prolific astronomer and creator of the eponymous equation describing the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy, passed away a few weeks ago at the age of 92. Drake’s equation helped to legitimize the hunt for life elsewhere in the universe. For Scientific American, Yuri Milner reflected on Drake’s impact on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and how his legacy is carrying on.

The View from Space

Two spiral galaxies appear to overlap one another in this recently released image from Hubble, but in reality, they aren’t interacting at all. The galaxy in the foreground is much closer than the one behind. Still, the view from Earth orbit reveals a breathtaking illusion.