China's Mars Rover Zhurong

China's first-ever Mars rover was on the move earlier this month, imagery by a NASA spacecraft shows.

The rover, named Zhurong, is part of Tianwen-1, China's first fully homegrown Red Planet mission, which arrived in orbit around Mars in February. Zhurong separated from the Tianwen-1 orbiter on May 14 and touched down on the vast plain Utopia Planitia a few hours later.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) photographed Zhurong on June 6 using its HiRISE ("High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment") camera, which is capable of resolving features as small as a coffee table on the red dirt far below.

The HiRISE team released a second image of Zhurong taken on June 11, which shows the rover and its tracks extending noticeably farther away from the mission's landing platform.

"The landing site remains distinctly colored from removal of Martian dust during landing, and movement of the Zhurong rover toward the south can be seen when comparing the two images," HiRISE team members wrote in a description of the photo.

MRO has been circling Mars since 2006, studying the planet's geology and climate, hunting for signs of water ice, scouting out good potential landing sites for future missions (both crewed and robotic) and serving as a communications relay between Mars rovers and landers and their controllers on Earth.

As the Zhurong images show, MRO also keeps tabs on the Red Planet's surface robots from time to time as well. Over the years, HiRISE has photographed NASA's Phoenix and InSight landers and the agency's Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and Perseverance rovers — and Zhurong as well.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Best Places for ET Life

If you want to believe, now is the time: the hope that we might one day stumble upon alien life is greater than it ever was. No, it’s not going to be little green men speeding through space in flying disks—more likely microbes or primitive bacteria. But a discovery like that would nevertheless be a sign that we are not alone in the universe—that life elsewhere is a possibility.

Where are we going to find that life? It was once thought the solar system was probably a barren wasteland apart from Earth. Rocky neighbors were too dry and cold like Mars, or too hot and hellish like Venus. The other planets were gas giants, and life on those worlds or their satellite moons was basically inconceivable. Earth seemed to be a miracle of a miracle.

But life isn’t that simple. We now know that life on Earth is able to thrive in even the harshest, most brutal environments, in super cold and super dry conditions, depths of unimaginable pressures, and without the need to use sunlight as a source of energy. At the same time, our cursory understanding of these obscure worlds has expanded tremendously. 

Our rocky neighbors of Venus and Mars may have once been temperate and Earth-like, and some of the life might have lingered on after these planets’ climates took a turn for the worse. Several of the icy moons that hang around Jupiter and Saturn might have underground oceans that could sustain life. A couple may even have atmospheres. And still other places that seem to be too exotic for life continue to surprise us.

Unlike the myriad of new exoplanets we’re identifying every year, when it comes to worlds in the solar system, we have the ability to send probes to these places and study them directly. “We can measure things that would be impossible to measure with telescopes,” says David Catling, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington. 

They could study things up close, maybe fly into the atmosphere or land on the surface, and perhaps one day even bring back samples that could reveal whether these planets and moons are home to materials or fossils that are evidence of life—or perhaps life itself.

Here are the 10 best places in the solar system to look for extraterrestrial life, subjectively ranked by yours truly for how likely we are to find life—and how easy it would be to find it if it’s there.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Life on Mars

Amid the latest exploration and search for life on Mars, a Cornell scientist wonders what kind of microbe humans could have accidentally “carried into space and survived the trip to make its new home on Mars.”

Cornell University geneticist Christopher Mason wrote in an May 10 piece for the BBC that life discovered on the red planet might have actually originated on earth in NASA labs, despite thorough on-site cleaning procedures and spacecraft assembly in specialized rooms.

Spacecraft, like the Perseverance Rover, are built in meticulously sterilized rooms piece by piece with each component cleaned before being added. This should theoretically ensure that no bacteria or organism survives the assembly process, according to Mason. Filtration systems in the spartan rooms offer an extra layer of protection so “only a few hundred particles can contaminate each square foot.”

“But, it is almost impossible to get to zero biomass. Microbes have been on Earth for billions of years, and they are everywhere,” Mason wrote. “They are inside us, on our bodies, and all around us. Some can sneak through even the cleanest of clean rooms.”

Mason says his own theoretical research has shown evidence of microbes that have the potential to be problematic during space missions, as the microbes contain increased genes that make them better able to resist radiation and cold environments.

“It turns out that clean rooms might serve as an evolutionary selection process for the hardiest bugs that then may have a greater chance of surviving a journey to Mars,” Mason wrote.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Life on Mars

Image of the surface of Mars (Moreux crater taken by the Mars Express orbiter. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

FROM BROWN UNIVERSITY...

New research suggests that rocks in the Martian crust could produce the same kind of chemical energy that supports microbial life deep beneath Earth’s surface.

As NASA’s Perseverance rover begins its search for ancient life on the surface of Mars, a new study suggests that the Martian subsurface might be a good place to look for possible present-day life on the Red Planet.

The study, published in the journal Astrobiology, looked at the chemical composition of Martian meteorites — rocks blasted off of the surface of Mars that eventually landed on Earth. The analysis determined that those rocks, if in consistent contact with water, would produce the chemical energy needed to support microbial communities similar to those that survive in the unlit depths of the Earth. Because these meteorites may be representative of vast swaths of the Martian crust, the findings suggest that much of the Mars subsurface could be habitable.

“The big implication here for subsurface exploration science is that wherever you have groundwater on Mars, there’s a good chance that you have enough chemical energy to support subsurface microbial life,” said Jesse Tarnas, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led the study while completing his Ph.D. at Brown University. “We don’t know whether life ever got started beneath the surface of Mars, but if it did, we think there would be ample energy there to sustain it right up to today.”

In recent decades, scientists have discovered that Earth’s depths are home to a vast biome that exists largely separated from the world above. Lacking sunlight, these creatures survive using the byproducts of chemical reactions produced when rocks come into contact with water.

One of those reactions is radiolysis, which occurs when radioactive elements within rocks react with water trapped in pore and fracture space. The reaction breaks water molecules into their constituent elements, hydrogen and oxygen. The liberated hydrogen is dissolved in the remaining groundwater, while minerals like pyrite (fool’s gold) soak up free oxygen to form sulfate minerals. Microbes can ingest the dissolved hydrogen as fuel and use the oxygen preserved in the sulfates to “burn” that fuel.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

The Red Planet

 

A sea of dark dunes, sculpted by the wind into long lines, surrounds the northern polar cap
covering an area as big as Texas. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

A sea of dark dunes, sculpted by the wind into long lines, surrounds Mars’ northern polar cap and covers an area as big as Texas. In this false-color image, areas with cooler temperatures are recorded in bluer tints, while warmer features are depicted in yellows and oranges. Thus, the dark, sun-warmed dunes glow with a golden color. This image covers an area 19 miles (30 kilometers) wide.

This scene combines images taken during the period from December 2002 to November 2004 by the Thermal Emission Imaging System instrument on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. It is part of a special set of images marking the 20th anniversary of Odyssey, the longest-working Mars spacecraft in history. The pictured location on Mars is 80.3 degrees north latitude, 172.1 degrees east longitude.  SOURCE:  NASA

Originally From Mars

Evidence is building that Earth life originated on Mars and was brought to this planet aboard a meteorite, said biochemist Steven Benner of The Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology in Florida.

An oxidized form of the element molybdenum, which may have been crucial to the origin of life, was likely available on the Red Planet's surface long ago, but unavailable on Earth, said Benner, who presented his findings today (Aug. 28; Aug. 29 local time) at the annual Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Florence, Italy.

"It’s only when molybdenum becomes highly oxidized that it is able to influence how early life formed," Benner said in a statement. "This form of molybdenum couldn’t have been available on Earth at the time life first began, because 3 billion years ago, the surface of the Earth had very little oxygen, but Mars did. It’s yet another piece of evidence which makes it more likely life came to Earth on a Martian meteorite, rather than starting on this planet."

Organic compounds are the building blocks of life, but they need a little help to make things happen. Simply adding energy such as heat or light turns a soup of organic molecules into a tarlike substance, Benner said.

That's where oxidized molybdenum comes in. Inserting it or boron, another element, into the mix would help organics make the leap to life, Benner added.

"Analysis of a Martian meteorite recently showed that there was boron on Mars; we now believe that the oxidized form of molybdenum was there, too," he said.

Another point in Mars' favor is the likelihood that the early Earth was completely covered by water while the ancient Red Planet had substantial dry areas, Benner said. All of this liquid would have made it difficult for boron, which is currently found only in extremely dry places, to form in high enough concentrations on Earth when life was first evolving.

Further, Benner added, water is corrosive to RNA, which most researchers think was the first genetic molecule (rather than DNA, which came later).  READ MORE