Curiosity landed inside Mars' huge Gale Crater on Aug. 5, kicking off a two-year mission to determine if the Red Planet could ever have supported microbial life. The rover carries 10 different instruments, but SAM is Curiosity's heart, taking up more than half of its science payload by weight.
SAM is designed to detect organic compounds, the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it. The mission team hopes to feed the first soil samples into the instrument in the coming weeks.
We should expect to hear much more from Curiosity, and from SAM, as time goes on, scientists said.
"Let me emphasize — these are the first measurements," said Michael Meyer, Curiosity program scientist and lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program. "We can look forward to more discoveries as the instruments are tweaked, the measurements refined and as we move through time and the seasons of Mars."
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Add CommentJust an aside..as a geologist I can say you'd get some push back if by stating that living organisms produce more than 90% of the methane in Earth's atmosphere. That's an educated guess.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnyways, few biologists expect to find any current living organisms on Mars and, unfortunately from the soil samples so far, we've landed in a poor area for any detection of past life. Doesn't mean we can rule past life out but Curiosity was a dart that hit a discouraging site.
I find it curious that scientists are claiming that so much methane is produced by life on Earth. So where does that leave Titan? Since the moon is almost entirely methane, there must be some pretty significant life processes going on. I've been thinking more and more that most hydrocarbons on Earth are from planet creation processes, not decaying animals. It's simply inconceivable that living organisms of such vast quantities were buried so deeply (miles below the sea bottoms for example) that they could have created the vast reservoirs of hydrocarbons that we keep finding. It seems to me that methane is a natural part of planet creation AND under the extreme temperatures and pressures found deep in the crust combined with the presence of various catalytic materials, could have reformed the methane into long-chain hydrocarbons. When the oil was found near the surface it made sense that it was organic in creation, but the really deep stuff almost defies imagination that the crust pushed dead animals and plants that far into the depths. Then we discover that there's a Saturnian moon that is made almost entirely of this stuff and it certainly wasn't placed there by decaying animals or the flatulence of millions of herd animals.
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