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| The Curiosity rover takes a selfie. |
NASA’s Curiosity rover is still finding clues that could
point to the red planet once have been sustaining life it was revealed
today. Nitrates, key to sustaining life
on Earth, have been discovered in the Martian soil these could be an indication
that the planet once harboured life.
Nitrogen is a prime ingredient of life here on earth so the
discovery of it in the Martian rocks makes it more plausible that there was
once some forms of life on the red planet. As with the discovery of methane in December
2014 it doesn’t mean that there is life, but it shows that there could have
been life during the planets heyday. If nitrogen exists it would have been
possible to form the component parts of life like amino acids and DNA
The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) a lab on board the rover
found the compounds containing nitrogen in the sediment that it scooped and drilled
from the surface.
“Discovery of
indigenous Martian nitrogen in Mars surface materials has important
implications for habitability and, specifically, for the potential evolution of
a nitrogen cycle (the process where nitrogen is changed between its different forms
RBD) at some point in Martian history,” the authors of a new paper describing the findings write
“We’re going to
try to understand whether this process is still happening today at all or
whether this all happened in the past in a different Mars, in a different
climate regime, in a different atmosphere.” Jennifer
Stern, a NASA geochemist, told the LA Times "People want to follow the carbon, but in
many ways nitrogen is just as important a nutrient for life Life runs on
nitrogen as much as it runs on carbon."
The nitrate could
have arrived on the planet via lightning from a volcanic plume or by an
asteroid impact causeing thermal shock rather than by life itself having created
it.
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