Mars Rovers Will Need to Dig Deeper If They Want to Find Evidence of Life - by ET_Exists
published in the journal, researchers have determined that NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover will have to dig two meters beneath the Martian surface in order to find traces of ancient life. This is because the surface of Mars is constantly bombarded with extreme levels of solar radiation that scientists hypothesize would quickly degrade small molecules such as amino acids.
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover took this selfie at a location nicknamed “Mary Anning” after a 19th century English paleontologist. Curiosity snagged three samples of drilled rock at this site on its way out of the Glen Torridon region, which scientists believe was a site where ancient conditions would have been favorable to supporting life, if it ever was present.
“Our results suggest that amino acids are destroyed by cosmic rays in the Martian surface rocks and regolith at much faster rates than previously thought,” said Alexander Pavlov of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Current Mars rover missions drill down to about two inches . At those depths, it would take only 20 million years to destroy amino acids completely. The addition of perchlorates and water increases the rate of amino acid destruction even further.
The research team subjected several types of amino acids to simulated conditions on the Red Planet, to include vacuum conditions and varying temperatures. The reason for this is because Mars exhibits, to include an atmospheric pressure literally a fraction of our own and far colder temperatures.
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