Hitting Pay Dirt on Mars

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/science/space/hitting-pay-dirt-on-mars.html

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It looked to be uniformly bland, which is why scientists chose it as the first rock to be examined up close last year by the Mars rover Curiosity: a run-of-the-mill volcanic rock, something to test and calibrate the rover’s instruments.

Another Curiosity instrument, the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer, also measures the chemical make-up of rocks and soil. It makes more precise measurements than ChemCam, but it requires the rover driving up to a rock and placing the instrument against it to make measurements. This image shows the scattering pattern of nearly 27 hours of X-rays.

The water in the dust could be a resource for future astronauts. Heating up a cubic foot of dirt would yield a couple of pints of water, Dr. Leshin said.

Dr. Grotzinger, the project scientist, said the water could also conceivably be something for hypothetical Martian microbes to drink, although Curiosity has yet to find any of the molecules necessary for carbon-based life.

Possibly complicating life for human visitors, Curiosity also found that the chemicals called perchlorates, which can cause thyroid problems, are prevalent at the landing site. An earlier NASA mission, Phoenix Mars, had found perchlorates near the north pole.

“It’s suggesting perhaps a global distribution of these salts,” said Daniel P. Glavin, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Ames Research Laboratory and the lead author of the paper that reported the perchlorate findings.

The perchlorates also complicate Curiosity’s search for the carbon-based molecules known as organics that could be the building blocks for life, past or present. Heated in the presence of perchlorates, organic molecules disintegrate into simple carbon dioxide.