A region of the Atacama Desert called Redstone
Armando Azua Bustos
The scientific instruments we sent to Mars may not be able to detect signs of life there.Testing of these instruments on samples from atacama desert Chile shows that it may not be sensitive enough to find biological material, even if it exists on Mars.
Armando Azua Bustos At the Spanish Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, his colleagues took samples in a desert area called Redstone. Redstone dust is red because it is full of hematite, the same mineral that gives Mars its rusty color. “This is probably the most Mars-like place on Earth,” he says Azua-Bustos. “Being there is like being on Mars, except for the color of the sky.”
When they used the most advanced scientific instruments – the kind only available in laboratories on Earth – To analyze the composition of the samples, they found up to 1 microgram of DNA per gram of soil. It contained DNA from 19 species of bacteria and 2 fungi.
But almost half of the microbial DNA didn’t match anywhere in our genetic database, leading researchers to refer to these microbes as the “dark microbiome.” This could mean that they are organisms that have never been discovered before, or are the remains of organisms that lived in the area hundreds of millions of years ago. I know the arrays, I know the arrays, but I don’t know what they are,” says Azua-Bustos.
When the researchers tested the samples using instruments similar to those on board current Mars rovers and those planned for the near future, they found that the instruments, whether dark or not , almost no microbial material could be detected. “If you were an alien who came to Earth and happened to land in the Atacama Desert with equipment like you have on Mars, you might say that Earth is uninhabited,” says Azuabustos. “If these instruments can’t detect what we know to be at this site, how can we see anything on Mars that we don’t even know what we’ll find?”
If there is life on Mars, this probably means that the probe will not find convincing evidence of life. “We must be cautious about interpreting the absence of strong evidence for the existence of life as evidence for the absence of life,” he wrote. carol stoker At the NASA Ames Research Center in California, in the comments that accompany the paper. This is a task NASA plans to carry out in his late 2020s.
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