NASA Now Looking For Life's Building Blocks On Mars

I have been trying to do some posts these last two days, but the pain and back spasms, from my ruptured disc is making any kind of concentration nearly impossible.

I did find this cool little story after I watched the news reports about the "find" of water on Mars, and thought we would post this little interesting story from Yahoo News, about what they shall be looking for next.

Phoenix Mars Lander may have found water ice on the red planet, but it still has a lot of work left to do to answer the question that has been on scientists' minds for decades: Has Mars ever been capable of harboring life?

Phoenix scientists announced yesterday that the mission finally confirmed the presence of subsurface water ice in the north polar regions of Mars — first detected by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter in 2002 — about two months after touching down on the Martian surface on May 25.

The lander is now analyzing the ice to see if it was ever a liquid and if it contains organic materials, the building blocks of life.

The ice, collected from below the surface at the lander's site in the Martian arctic, could have acted like a freezer, protecting any organics that may have formed there.

We have an environment where organics could be preserved," said mission scientist William Boynton of the University of Arizona.

The detection of organics on Mars would not necessarily mean there is life. It would just mean that carbon and other molecules that make up life as we know it were present.

"Organics would be the home run or the grand slam of the mission," said Bruce Jakosky, a geologist at the University of Colorado who is not affiliated with the mission. However, if they don't find organics, "that doesn't mean that there wasn't life on Mars," Jakosky said. Other missions, planned and unplanned, will keep the search alive.



link to full story