THE LARGEST ORGANIC MOLECULES AND THE MARTIAN JABUTICABAS скачать в хорошем качестве

THE LARGEST ORGANIC MOLECULES AND THE MARTIAN JABUTICABAS

📎 SPACE TODAY AT THE THEATER: "MARS, OUR NEXT DESTINATION?": APRIL 13 | 4PM | TEATRO GAZETA - SP TICKETS: https://bileto.sympla.com.br/event/10... 📎 VOLCANO WORKSHOP: APRIL 5 https://academyspace.com.br/WORKSHOP/ Researchers analyzing pulverized rock aboard NASA's Curiosity rover have found the largest organic compounds on the Red Planet to date. The discovery, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that prebiotic chemistry may have advanced further on Mars than previously observed. Scientists probed a sample of rock inside Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) mini-laboratory and found the molecules decane, undecane and dodecane. These compounds, which are made of 10, 11 and 12 carbons, respectively, are believed to be fragments of fatty acids that were preserved in the sample. Fatty acids are among the organic molecules that are the chemical building blocks of life on Earth. Living things produce fatty acids to help form cell membranes and perform a variety of other functions. But fatty acids can also be made in non-living environments, through chemical reactions triggered by a variety of geological processes, including the interaction of water with minerals in hydrothermal vents. While there is no way to confirm the origin of the identified molecules, finding them is exciting for Curiosity’s science team for a few reasons. Curiosity scientists have previously discovered small, simple organic molecules on Mars, but the discovery of these larger compounds provides the first evidence that organic chemistry has advanced toward the kind of complexity required for the origin of life on Mars. The authors found an additional intriguing detail in their study related to the number of carbon atoms that make up the presumed fatty acids in the sample. The backbone of each fatty acid is a long, straight chain of 11 to 13 carbons, depending on the molecule. Notably, non-biological processes typically produce shorter fatty acids, with fewer than 12 carbons. It’s possible that the Cumberland sample contained longer-chain fatty acids, scientists say, but SAM is not optimized to detect longer chains. Scientists say there’s ultimately a limit to how much they can infer from molecule-hunting instruments that might be sent to Mars. “We’re ready to take the next big step and bring Mars samples back to our labs to settle the debate about life on Mars,” Glavin said. Last week, the Perseverance science team was surprised by a strange rock made up of hundreds of millimeter-sized spheres … and now the team is hard at work trying to understand its origins. It’s been two weeks since Perseverance arrived at Broom Point, located on the lower slopes of the Witch Hazel Hill area on the rim of Jezero Crater. Here, a series of light- and dark-toned bands were visible from orbit, and last week the rover successfully sampled and sampled one of the light-toned beds. It was from this sampling workspace that Perseverance spied a very strange texture on a nearby rock… The rock, dubbed “St. Paul’s Bay” by the team, appeared to be composed of hundreds of millimeter-sized, dark-gray spheres. Some of them occurred as more elongated, elliptical shapes, while others had angular edges, perhaps representing fragments of broken spherules. Some spheres even had tiny holes! What quirk of geology could produce such strange shapes? This isn’t the first time strange spheres have been spotted on Mars. In 2004, the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity spotted so-called “Martian blueberries” in Meridiani Planum, and since then, the Curiosity rover has observed spherules in rocks in Yellowknife Bay in Gale Crater. Just a few months ago, Perseverance itself also spotted popcorn-like textures in sedimentary rocks exposed in the Jezero Crater’s inlet channel, Neretva Vallis. In each of these cases, the spherules were interpreted as concretions, features that formed by interaction with groundwater circulating through pore spaces in the rock. However, not all spherules form this way. They also form on Earth by the rapid cooling of droplets of molten rock formed in a volcanic eruption, for example, or by the condensation of rock vaporized by a meteorite impact. SOURCES: https://science.nasa.gov/blog/shockin... https://science.nasa.gov/missions/mar...   / spacetoday   #MARS #LIFE #UNIVERSE