Curiosity on Mars

Herbie Gomez .

THE recent discovery in Mars piqued my curiosity. While the discovery,  published in the Science journal, is not necessarily a smoking gun for biological activity in the Red Planet, we know now that it has key raw materials for life.

Since 2012, a rover called “Curiosity,” the size of a sedan, has been doing the rounds in a martian crater named “Gale.” It’s been gathering data about the planet’s climate and geology for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and to aid scientists in finding out if there was a time when its environment was friendly even to microbial life.

What it discovered is that there’s a whole cocktail of carbon-based compounds or organic molecules in the Gale Crater at a concentration about 100 times more than in other places in Mars. The organic molecules were in a three billion-year old mudstone found after the Curiosity rover drilled about five centimeters below the surface. Yes, these are building blocks for life!

The crater is basically a dry lake that, scientists are convinced, once had water — liquid water. Naturally, when there is a lake bed, expect its base to have sediments. What Nasa did was to send Curiosity down to see what got preserved.

The Gale Crater is not alone. Mars has shown traces of bygone water given its meandering riverbeds, river deltas, flood plains and lakes that have all since dried up. All the water seems to have evaporated. But if there was once water in Mars, what are the chances that this fourth planet from the sun had been a host to life?

A National Geographic report on June 7, 2018 showed that the Curiosity rover find suggests that there could have been life on Mars some 3.5 billion years ago. I put some emphasis on “there could have been” because the discovery is not conclusive evidence for ancient life — the molecules could be products of non-biological processes like iron in rocks reacting to liquid water. But it makes us seriously think about the possibility of erstwhile microbial activities and understand how it was possible for Mars to be a habitable planet for living martian organisms eons ago if ever there were life forms there.

Imagine what the scientists can find if they dug deeper into Mars.

We also know now that the chemical compound methane, the simplest organic molecule, is present in Mars. It makes us wonder because on Earth, biology is responsible for as much as 95 percent of methane in the atmosphere. We also know that methane doesn’t last in our own atmosphere for 3.5 billion years and so, scientists are excited over the prospects that the gas on Mars was “recently” created and released into its atmosphere. Basically, Mars “breathes” the methane as shown by the seasonal increases in the concentration of the chemical compound in the planet’s atmosphere.

Chris Webster, senior research fellow at the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said, “It’s a gas in the atmosphere of Mars that really shouldn’t be there.”

“It’s puzzling because [methane] survives only a few hundred years at a time, which means that somehow, something on the Red Planet keeps replenishing it,” reads part of the National Geographic article.

And so, what’s producing the martian methane?

The Mars exploration is something that ought to make us ponder on the value of life.

Here we are, humans, investing so much of our time, efforts and resources to expand our knowledge, to better understand life and our environment, our solar system and the universe, and in search for life forms beyond our atmosphere. Yet we haven’t been giving human life the kind of value that it so deserves. Stardusts and multitudinous organisms had probably “wanted” to become like us but didn’t. And so, I think that we haven’t been treasuring and preserving human life the way we should. Come to think of it, we haven’t really been thankful and cherishing the only earthly life we have.

What Nasa has been doing in Mars also shows us that our very own government hasn’t been investing much on science and that we have a long way to go before we could even grasp the importance of understanding science and what goes on in outer space, and how that knowledge could help us with our very own problems today and in the future. Pastilan.