BREAKING NEWS

NASA's Mars rover finds traces of carbon

By REUTERS

DECEMBER 4, 2012 05:10

SAN FRANCISCO - NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, dispatched to look for the chemical ingredients and environments for microbial life, has found hints of carbon, though whether this building block for life on Earth has played a similar role on Mars is unknown, scientists said on Monday.

"Just finding carbon somewhere doesn't mean that it has anything to do with life, or the finding of a habitable environment," lead scientist John Grotzinger, with the California Institute of Technology, told reporters at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.

"If you have organic carbon and you don't have any water, you don't have a habitable environment," he said.

Even with carbon and water, life needs other chemicals, such as sulfur, oxygen, phosphorous and nitrogen, to form and evolve.

"It's not unexpected that this sand pile would not be rich in organics. It's been exposed to the harsh Martian environment," added planetary scientist Paul Mahaffy, with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

"It's really going to be an exciting hunt over the course of this mission to find early environments that might be protected from this surface Mars environment and see what we can add to the carbon story," Mahaffy said.

IDF, Hezbollah exchange fire on Lebanon border

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF

04/26/2024 01:22 AM

Bernie Sanders to Netanyahu: you are using antisemitism as a distraction

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF

04/26/2024 12:33 AM

Yeshiva University re-opens admissions amid safety concerns on campuses

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF

04/26/2024 12:19 AM

US preparing to announce $6b in weapons for Ukraine, Politico reports

By REUTERS

04/26/2024 12:12 AM