Category Archives: Mars

The days are getting longer and the games are running out, but still Liverpool are clinging on to what remains a race for the Premier League title, and the dream of the quadruple tired, a little ragged and with the possibility of another man down in their pursuit of Manchester City.

Whatever lies ahead now, through Saturdays FA Cup final and the Champions League in Paris in 17 days time, as well as those last two games of the league season, all or part might have to be navigated without Fabinho who felt pain in the first half at Villa Park. Jurgen Klopp said later that the player himself was hopeful the damage to a hamstring was not too serious. One of those hazards of a season that has stretched to the maximum number of games, three Cup finals and City just tantalisingly out of reach.

Sadio Mane delivered the win eventually, although it was never comfortable and on the touchline Steven Gerrard, watching with the customary furrowed brow. There were moments when his team were close to the goal that might have handed the title to City and yet Gerrards former club found a way to win. He was off the pitch swiftly afterwards but not before he embraced Mane and whispered something to Liverpools matchwinner.

Mane was the sharp edge of what was an untidy performance at times, built on the strength of Virgil Van Dijk and Joel Matips partnership in defence. The winning goal was a classic Liverpool attack with the ball turned over swiftly and opponents in reverse but it was still a long way from some of the dominant performances of just a fortnight earlier when they had bossed Villarreal at Anfield in the Champions League semi-final first leg. The exhaustion is starting to tell and Klopp is having to take chances on resting some of his biggest names.

The Liverpool manager would not be definitive on Fabinho saying that the player had been quite positive in the aftermath about what he said was pain in the hamstring. I am not sure what I can make of that, he said, we will see.

Neither Mohamed Salah nor Thiago Alcantara started the game, although both of them were called upon before the end. There was not even a place on the bench of Andy Robertson, given a rest at home, Klopp said, and the Scots deputy at left-back, Kostas Tsimikas, had a fine game including a crucial second half challenge on Ollie Watkins. Its about decision making, Klopp said, and if you ask me now, I would say Leave Fabinho out.

It was a struggle at times yet find a way Liverpool did, this time one of the last darts and twists down the left from Luis Diaz, crossing for Mane to angle his header away from anyone who might put glove or boot upon it.

Klopps team departed Villa Park once more level on 86 points with City who have their opportunity to restore the three-point margin away at Wolverhampton Wanderers on Wednesday night. It was a night when Gerrard, as well as Philippe Coutinho and Danny Ings, threatened to be the ghosts of Liverpool title challenges past and against a less resilient side may well have done so.

Here is the original post:

Sadio Mane keeps tiring Liverpool in title race but Fabinho injury mars win - The Telegraph

NASA's life-hunting Perseverance Mars rover just reached a big mission milestone.

Perseverance has arrived safely at the remains of an ancient Red Planet river delta on the floor of the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater, NASA announced today (April 19).

Mission team members said the delta will be a "veritable geologic feast" for Perseverance, which is hunting for signs of fossilized Mars life. (The most promising rocks will be cached for a sample-return mission campaign that NASA and its European counterpart intend to launch later this decade.)

"We've been eyeing the delta from a distance for more than a year while we explored the crater floor," Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist at the California Institute of Technology, said in a statement Wednesday (April 19) from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages Perseverance's mission.

Now that the rover is in the region, its next moves will be "obtaining images of ever-greater detail revealing where we can best explore these important rocks," Farley added.

Related: 12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover's 1st year on Mars

Perseverance landed in February 2021 inside Jezero Crater, which mission scientists have said hosted a lake and a river delta billions of years ago. Such conditions should be amenable to microbes, meaning the delta region is a rich area to search for signs of Mars life (if it ever existed).

The rover was working somewhat south and west of its landing site during its first (Earth) year on Mars but recently made it way back through the touchdown area to get to the delta. Perseverance will spend about the next week driving to the southwest, and the west, to figure out how best to explore this patch of the delta.

Perseverance's data suggests that the delta deposits are about 130 feet (40 meters) above the crater floor, and the teams are considering two options, according to the JPL statement. The preferred route, at least for now, is through a region nicknamed "Hawksbill Gap," as it appears to be reachable in a shorter time. But a backup option, "Cape Nukshak," is available in case data in the coming days shows it to be a safer route.

"Whichever route Perseverance takes to the plateau atop the delta, the team will perform detailed science investigations, including taking rock core samples, on the way up, then turn around and do the same thing on the way back down," JPL officials said in the statement.

The rover will spend roughly six months picking up eight samples during this maneuvering campaign, called Delta Front. The plan then calls for Perseverance to go on top of the delta again, perhaps taking the backup option to sample a region untraveled before, to spend six more months on a "Delta Top Campaign."

"The delta is why Perseverance was sent to Jezero Crater: It has so many interesting features," Farley said. "We will look for signs of ancient life in the rocks at the base of the delta, rocks that we think were once mud on the bottom of 'Lake Jezero.'"

Perseverance will also attempt to pick up sand and rock fragments originating from upstream, in areas that the rover is not expected to visit during its lifetime on Mars. Farley said the geography will be an immense help: "We can take advantage of an ancient Martian river that brought the planet's geological secrets to us."

JPL officials added that Perseverance began its second science campaign a month earlier than expected, due to its upgraded autonomous hazard-detection system that allows it to dodge obstacles in Jezero Crater such as boulders, sharp rocks, craters and sandpits. (The rover was commanded to halt and turn in place 55 times to avoid hazards during this latest road trip, JPL added.)

By contrast, NASA's decade-older Curiosity Mars rover had to turn back recently from a planned route due to dangerous "gator-back" terrain. Curiosity also sports an older version of Martian wheel less optimized for the sometimes treacherous terrain, as compared to Perseverance. JPL officials say that Percy's wheels have twice as many treads and a gentle curve, which is more adaptable to the terrain.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter@howellspace. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcomor Facebook.

Read the original:

Perseverance rover arrives at ancient Mars river delta - Space.com

They should all be visible this month.

This week, the pre-dawn hours are bringing a planet-spotting party for skywatchers. Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Saturn will be visible in a diagonal line, joined by a waning gibbous moon that's still more than 90% full.

Look for this cosmic gang in the east-southeast sky before dawn. You can typically distinguish planets from stars as they are brighter and twinkle less. Jupiter will be the lowest and furthest to the left, followed by Venus, Mars and Saturn tracing an invisible line moving up and to the right.

For help spotting planets, an app like Stellarium can be quite helpful.

A fifth planet is also visible in the night sky but not at the same time. Mercury can be seen in the evening but will set before the others arise in the morning.

The quartet of worlds will re-appear each morning for the rest of the month as the moon shrinks to a crescent. By the end of April, we'll see this grinning moon slide beneath the lineup of planets on successive nights. It will underline Saturn on April 25, Mars the following night, and both Jupiter and Venus on April 27.

Venus and Jupiter will continue to approach one another until they will appear nearly side-by-side in the sky on April 30. In fact, it's the closest they've appeared since 2016 and likely will be easier to see this time around due to more favorable positioning in relation to the emerging morning sun.

Of course, the planets are in no actual danger of colliding, as they're really millions of miles apart. They just appear close from our perspective on Earth. If Venus were to ever come anywhere near Jupiter, it would probably be pulled in by the gas giant's gravity and end up getting swallowed by it. That is, if it isn't destroyed as it gets pelted by Jupiter's dozens of moons first.

That would provide for a truly rare and terrifying show in the night sky if it ever did happen.

Receive expert tips on using phones, computers, smart home gear and more. Delivered Tuesdays and Thursdays.

See the original post:

How to See Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and Venus Form a Rare Lineup This Month - CNET

This is a smarter-than-it-sounds sci-fi romcom, the kind Gen-Z kids would presumably dig. It sends a seemingly mismatched boy-girl couple poor, hapless but good-hearted Walt (Cole Sprouse, from Riverdale) and super-competent but neurotic swot Sophie (Lana Condor from To All the Boys Ive Loved Before) into space following their respective romantic partners who have already flown ahead to a much-coveted colony on Mars. So while the overall project is a heterosexual space-rom, along the way there are sprightly touches: thoughtful world-building (Earth, as in Wall-E has become one huge toxic garbage dump); snarky jabs at billionaire space entrepreneurs (Zach Braff co-stars as a capricious Elon Muskian tech overlord); and a cute lesbian couple with commitment issues (Cameron Esposito and Sunita Deshpande).

Most welcome of all is the generous sprinkling of good one-liners thanks to screenwriter Max Taxes witty script, solid direction from Christopher Winterbauer, and a cast with nippy comic timing. Sprouse, who gets the lions share of screen time and most of the best lines, represents a particularly likable non-threatening-boy lead: himbo-handsome but not too much, pitching his performance right in the sweet spot between goofy and vulnerable. His Walt has wanted to join the space programme for years but has failed more than 30 times. When he falls in love with Ginny (Emily Rudd) the night before she flies to Mars, he decides with dumb romcom hero logic that the smartest thing to do would be to stow away on the next flight and force new acquaintance Sophie to help keep up the pretence that hes her boyfriend Calvin (Mason Gooding) whos actually already there.

Arguably Taxes script relies a little too much on jokes about helpful yet sinister robots, like the passive-aggressive one named Gary that works with Walt in a coffee shop and keeps threatening to get him sacked. Mind you, one of them has a pretty funny line about how the consequences of forcing a boy and a girl human to share a room is either one more human or one less!

Moonshot is released on 25 April on digital platforms.

Excerpt from:

Moonshot review sprightly space romcom stows away to Mars - The Guardian

The appeal of stories crafted by Edgar Rice Burroughs lives on to this day, with John Carter of Mars #1 revisiting some classic tales. Whenever a new generation of fans think of the name "John Carter," they may recount the decidedly mixed reviews of the 2012 live-action movie from Walt Disney Pictures. However, John Carter rose to fame from Burroughs' timeless novels, which have since been adapted into various comic book series from Dynamite Entertainment. The latest installment comes from Chuck Brown, George Kambadais, and Jeff Eckleberry. Even if this is your first time reading a John Carter story, the first issue does a satisfactory job of filling readers in on the basics while teeing up more adventures to come.

Starting off with John Carter's "Eternal Reward" helps to give a quick glimpse at how John has established a life for himself on Mars/Barsoom. He has a wife in Dejah Thoris, a young son, and seems to be living the good life. Through unforeseen circumstances, however, John is whisked back to Earth seemingly after his death. The timeline of events comes across a little uneven since we don't know exactly when John died. However, "Eternal Reward" alludes to this being the afterlife, and John's spirit is sent back to his Earthly grave.

A group of Army soldiers summarizes John Carter's life, including serving in the military, his unexplained disappearance, and how it's possibly linked to other missing people, animals, and objects around the globe. Kambadais excels at switching back and forth between the fantastical elements of space and the grounded aspects of Earth. Brown even makes a point to highlight how John never married and had no children on Earth, while we know that's the complete opposite of his life on Mars. Quickly explaining the time period and segregated Army units is another nice touch since it's something that could easily be glossed over by the reader.

The unlikely alliance between General Etor and the Green Martians serves to link both of John Carter's home worlds together. The origin behind a powerful severed hand calls for more explanation, but that will assumedly come in future issues. We do learn that the hand is behind the revival of John Carter, so there's at least that nugget of information. Another thing we learn is John Carter possessed superhuman abilities on Mars, given to him by this hand. So it may be likely that the hand is also the power that teleported him from Earth to Mars in the first place.

Lt. Hines and John Carter share a love for their missing wives, which is what sends the lieutenant on a search for answers at the Carter Mansion. Lt. Hines and his friend Charlie make for competent sidekicks, quickly adapting to the idea of a man returning from the dead and invading aliens roaming the planet. It should be fun to see all three gentlemen on Mars, and how Lt. Hines and Charlie adapt to a new, strange environment. Making one of the important supporting characters a Black man not only diversifies the John Carter series but also acts as an entryway into the story for readers, experiencing events along with the audience.

Published byDynamite Entertainment

OnApril 20, 2022

Written byChuck Brown

Art byGeorge Kambadais

Colors byGeorge Kambadais

Letters byJeff Eckleberry

Cover byJunggeun Yoon

Visit link:

John Carter of Mars #1 Review: The Classic Martian Adventure Returns With a New Spin - ComicBook.com

Before departing, crews attend periodic Zoom meetings to get acquainted and discuss plans. Klos diligently practiced maneuvering her camera while wearing her dads motorcycle helmet and thick ski gloves before her first trip. But nothing could prepare her for the real thing. You don't know exactly how you're going to feel until you're there and you're suddenly in your spacesuit, and you cant move, she said. Youre surrounded by lava fields and these rocks that look like they'd be easy to cross. But suddenly you get close to them and they're the size of an SUV, and that's what you have to traverse.

The missions arent just physically challenging. With limited power and energy, access to the internet and outside world is extremely limited. Homesickness inevitably sets in. Youre not fully connected like we normally are, Klos said. Everyone misses their partners, their kidsits partially missing them, but also wishing you could share the experience with them, because its just so cool. Shes learned to pack photos from home, bring board games to bond with fellow crew members, and study up as much as possible about each mission before leaving (all things she recommends the rest of us do if we ever get the chance to visit Mars).

Today Klos is based in Boston, working as the New England liaison for Duke Universitys Archive of Documentary Arts and taking freelance photo assignments on the side. Despite all her experience in a spacesuit, she isnt itching to hop on the first flight to the red planet. (She would consider the moon, thougha much more manageable three-day trip, each way.) Depicting actual space travel was never her goal. As an artist, shes more focused on drawing viewers into a kind of simulation of their own. When we see her photos of life on Mars, she wants us to do a double take, to get caught somewhere in an images blurred line between fact and fiction.

I like to think about how I can make an audience question what theyre looking at, and to question the validity of photography as a tool to give us proof of a story, she said. This is a project that wont be done until we have one person on Marsbecause then it will be a reality.

More here:

Picturing Life on the Red Planet | Tufts Now - Tufts Now

NASA's Perseverance rover is on a mission to sleuth out past evidence of life on Mars. Along the way, it found evidence of Earthlings.

This week, the space agency posted an image of two objects the rover passed while traversing the Martian desert: a discarded parachute and a metal capsule. Both played vital roles in helping the car-sized exploration rover land safely on Mars.

"Definitely wouldnt be where I am without them!" NASA tweeted from the Perseverance rover's Twitter account.

You can spot the objects in the middle of the image. On left is the collapsed orange and white parachute; on right is a conspicuous part of the shell that housed the rover as it plunged through Mars' atmosphere in February 2021.

Landing the 2,260-pound, $2.7 billion rover on Mars was an impressive feat, dubbed the "seven minutes of terror." The plummeting spacecraft, traveling at some 1,000 mph, deployed a supersonic parachute to slow down. It ditched its heavy heat shield. Before choosing a safe landing spot (free of boulders, pits, or dangerous rocks), it abandoned the parachute; then a rocket-powered apparatus fired up and hovered in the air while carefully lowering the rover down to the ground. Everything must work swimmingly and it did.

The rover is now on its way to a dried-up delta in Mars' Jezero Crater, a place planetary scientists believe once hosted a lake.

"This delta is one of the best locations on Mars for the rover to look for signs of past microscopic life," NASA said.

Follow this link:

Mars rover rumbles by crashed artifacts in the Martian desert - Mashable

Blue Origin passengers marvel at space view

Blue Origin launched and landed its fourth human flight for the New Shepard program, blasting off Thursday from rural Texas. (Mar. 31)

AP

As stargazers spend the late hours of the night watching theLyrid meteor shower this week, those who are up in the early mornings will have the chance to capture another phenomenon: Four planets in our solar system will appear to line up in the sky.

At the beginning of the month, Mars, Venus and Saturn were all visible in the early morning. Now, the trio are joined by Jupiter, and the four planetscan be seen by the naked eye in a straight line for the rest of April, as long as city lights don't intrude.

The reason for the rare occurrence: All of the planet's orbits around the sun lining up. Venus' orbit around the sun is 225 Earth days, while Saturn's is 29 years.

The conjunction can be seen across the world in the predawn hours of the morning by looking eastor towardthe sunrise.

"By mid-month, Jupiter is starting to rise in the pre-dawn hour, making for a quartet of planets, strung out in a line across the morning sky," NASA said.

Those in the Northern Hemisphere will see the four planets across the horizon. EarthSky.org reportedall of the planets "will be stretched out in a diagonal line spanning just over 30 degrees" by Tuesday.From lower left to upper right stargazers can find: Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Saturn.

People in the Southern Hemisphere will see the planets in a line going up the horizon.From the horizon to the north you can find: Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Saturn.

SHOOTING STARS: How to watch every meteor shower in 2022

BIGGER THAN RHODE ISLAND: Astronomers confirm size of largest comet ever discovered

SPACE PHOTOS: Stunning images you have to see

As the month nears its end, the moon will join in the conjunction, appearing below each of the planets from April 25-27, according to Space.com. On April 30, Venus and Jupiter will appear to be headed towarda collision course. Theywill be about0.45 degrees away from each other in the sky before they begin to drift apart.

The alignment comes afterJupiter and Saturn cametogether in December2020 in the "Great Conjunction," when they appeared the closestthey have beensince the Middle Ages.

This won't be the only time you can spot multiple planets at once this year. From late June to early July, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn will appear in the early morning sky.

Follow Jordan Mendoza on Twitter:@jordan_mendoza5.

More:

Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all visible through April. Here's how to see them. - USA TODAY

If humans have any hope of prolonged survival on another world, it will depend on the extraterrestrial ground beneath their boots. Thanks to the exorbitant cost of shipping goods and materials through spacecraft, astronauts must capitalize on what they find. On Mars, this means rocks, dust, and little else.

Researchers have dreamed up dozens of uses for Martian dirt, including as soil for planting, cement for landing pads, and, possibly, coagulants for deadly bleeding. Theres a hitch, though: Theres no Mars dirt on our planet. Absolutely none. Instead, Earth minerals must simulate Martian stuff. A cottage industry for this faux-alien matter has bloomed, offering soils tailored to resemble those found on other planets, asteroids, and the moon.

About 30 different Martian simulants have been developed according to one recent review study by materials scientists, making up for Earths complete lack of Mars dirt. Two U.S. purveyors are among the top sources: The Martian Garden in Austin and University of Central Floridas Exolith Lab. NASAs Extraterrestrial Materials Simulation Laboratory, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, also makes soil simulants and rock analogues for in-house use. So do some private spaceflight companies.

Demand has been going up steadily, planetary scientist and Exolith Lab founder Daniel Britt told The Daily Beast. The lab, which began formulating simulants in 2015, now has more than 1,000 customers. Some may buy just a few dozen pounds of the stuff. Others have picked up 10 tons of simulant in shipping containers. Exolith Lab supplied 80 times the amount of soil in 2021 than it did in 2018.

Of course, not just any dirt will do. The bottom line here is that when youre going to be operating in alien environments, theyre alien, Britt said. Earth has abundant oxygen, active tectonics, liquid water and living things that warp or corrode soil in ways that dont occur on Mars or the moon.

It requires curation, and often pulverization, to become a good stand-in for Mars soil. Rocks and minerals may be cooked to remove organic features, crushed into powder, blended, moistened, and dried out, before the simulant can be a useful research tool.

Fake Mars dirt has been mixed with human blood protein into a brick-like composite. It has been spiked with nitrogen-fixing germs to coax plants to grow. It has been sintered to create clay, then spun into a bowl on a potters wheel.

Christian Kastrup, who studies how blood clots at the University of British Columbia, hypothesizes that sterilized Mars soil might be used akin to gauze, plugging up bad wounds. A few years ago, Kastrup and his colleagues discovered that human blood plasma reacts with a mineral in Earth soil, triggering clotting.

We believe our blood naturally responds to silicates that are in soil, Kastrup told The Daily Beast. He couldnt say yet what his lab has found using Mars simulantsthe experiments are underwaybut Mars, it turns out, has those same silicates. The goal is a dressing, which astronauts might not have had space to pack, for injuries much larger than what youd use a Band-Aid for, Kastrup said.

Using Earth-bound dirt as a cosmic substitute is a practice that dates back to preparations for the Apollo missions. Various rocks were crushed into powders to predict what the early astronauts might encounter. Moon simulants are still used, too, because the real stuff is so precious. Apollo astronauts collected 842 pounds of lunar rocks, sand and dust. NASA doles that stuff out by the milligram.

The first generation of Mars soil simulants was created in the 1990s. Johnson Space Centers Mars-1 was orange soil from a Hawaiian volcano. The color was right, but the contents were lacking. It wasnt a great match to the stuff thats actually on the surface, Colorado School of Mines geology professor Kevin Cannon, who helped develop Exolith Labs Mars simulant while at UCF, told The Daily Beast

About a decade after Mars-1s debut, Greg Peters, then at the Extraterrestrial Materials Simulation Laboratory, and his colleagues created the Mojave Mars simulant. In Californias Mojave Desert rises Saddleback Mountain, redder than the surrounding landscape. Peters knew the place wellit was near a borax mine where his father had worked for decades.

Samples he gathered from the butte were promising. It turns out, its a fair chemical match to Mars, Peters, a technology manager at NASAs Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, told The Daily Beast. The simulant was well receivedNASA had about 10 tons of the stuff, and the paper describing the simulant has been cited more than 100 times.

It also inspired two Austin park rangers to develop their own faux-Martian dirt. In the mid-2010s, the pair, both space fans, launched a Kickstarter offering planters full of the Mojave soil. The Martian Garden was born. The company has since developed an in-house blend made by combining the Mojave Mars basalt with iron oxide, Mark Cusimano, one of the former rangers and Martian Gardens chief technology officer told The Daily Beast.

Martian Garden has supplied classrooms, NASA, private companies, and universities, Cusimano said, at a few pounds to 10,000 pounds an order.

We try not to kill our customers.

Daniel Britt, Exolith Lab

In Florida, meanwhile, Cannon and Britt created their simulant from scratch, based on Mars surface data collected by NASAs Curiosity rover. The rover was equipped with an X-ray diffractometer, the first robot to have such an instrument on another planet. It very nicely tells you all of the minerals that are present in the sample and in what proportions, said Cannon.

Exolith Labs Mars Global Simulant draws from sources across the planet. It has acquired rock from natural structures in Idaho and Greenland, as well as commercially available minerals, such as iron ores meant for making ceramics.

Some of these minerals are pretty tough to get, said Cannon, who now makes bespoke simulants for Kastrup and other clients. He has sourced a mineral called plagioclase, making up 40 percent to 50 percent of Mars rocks and soil, from waste at the Stillwater platinum mine in Montana.

Once collected, the minerals are crushed and mixed. At first, Exolith Labs undergraduates used sledgehammers to smash rocks to size. The lab has since subbed out the undergrads for industrial mills originally made for mining, which pulverize minerals between steel plates. Mars soil shouldnt feel like beach sand, Britt saidthe product is more jagged, without the benefit of waves to wash away the sharp points.

The result is a cocktail of rocks with names like anhydrite, ferrihydrite, hematite, magnetite, olivine, plagioclase and pyroxene. Its not a perfect mineral match to Mars. You can introduce more minor chemicals that are present in the soil, Cannon said, but it's all a trade-off between the scale, the cost and the accuracy.

In fact, perfection could be dangerous. Exact replicas of some asteroids, for example, would be illegal to market in states like California due to the space rocks high concentrations of carcinogenic chemicals. We try not to kill our customers, Britt said. Handling the material Exolith Lab provides, he added, is about as safe as sitting on beach sand.

One day, it will no longer be true that our planet lacks Martian dirt. NASAs Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in 2020, is equipped with what Peters called the most complex mechanism thats ever been set to another planet: a 7-foot-long drill-tipped arm, which will gather samples of Mars to be sealed in tubes. If all goes well, another robotic mission will retrieve those samples and return them to Earth in the 2030s.

When that sample return happens, thats going to be a big game-changer, Cusimano said. With the genuine article in hand, scientists will perform the deepest probe yet into the contents of Mars dirt, wringing fine details from the alien matter. Earths mineral mimics should only get better.

See the original post here:

Making Fake Martian Dirt for Future Mars Exploration Is a New Way of Business for These Labs and Startups - The Daily Beast

Jessica Torres shows me a tiny glass tube she uses to sort through molecules. Torres, a researcher in a chemistry lab at San Diego State University, can tell by the molecules' movement what kind they are, and hopes to use this method to see signs of life in material gathered from Mars.

But finding life signs on the surface of Mars can seem like a daunting task theres no water, and it has punishing solar rays and a high-salt content.

If there was life to be detected on Mars, it would be in porous rocks or the underside of rocks, Torres said. Somewhere thats kind of shielded from the harsh environment that is Mars.

Life on other planets is something many imagine. But so far theres no proof that life exists anywhere but Earth. Thats why Torres and her advisor, chemistry professor Chris Harrison, are working on a way to find molecular traces of life on Mars.

But they're not talking about complex or intelligent life more likely microorganisms.

RELATED: NASA Rover Lands On Mars To Look For Signs Of Ancient Life

Harrison, an analytical chemist, said the goal of his lab is not really to find life on Mars, but to find evidence it once existed.

Were looking for the building-block molecules that make life function, so specifically amino acids, he said. These are the little LEGO blocks that you assemble in the right sequence and you get different proteins and enzymes and the functional components of cells.

Thomas Fudge

The glass tube they use to sort out life-building molecules has a channel that's more narrow than a human hair. Molecules suspended in water pass through at different speeds, depending on their size and their electrical charge. This race through the tube could determine if you're looking at an amino acid.

If their instrument hitched a ride on a rocket and given to a Mars rover, the tube could be encased in a clear cartridge a little more than an inch long and used to study Mars' surface.

Torres said NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a partner in their study, has found a place on Earth thats a little like Mars to test such instruments: the Atacama Desert in Chile.

It does receive very low rainfall throughout the year, she said. Theyve tested their soil samples and have detected very low levels of fatty acids and other biosignatures in that soil. Which is pretty great since it means their technology would be very suitable for a Mars-like environment.

NASA has been successfully landing on Mars since the 1970s, and the first images from the planet showed a perfectly barren landscape. But eventually they did find evidence of old riverbeds, likely formed by past water flows.

RELATED: Perseverance's Video Cameras Capture Its Arrival On Mars (There's Audio, Too)

Today, the Mars rover Perseverance is parked on a dry river delta, collecting sedimentary rocks that could harbor signs of life.

Michael Meyer, NASAs lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program, said the space agency will try to transport Mars samples to Earth. The elaborate plan is to land rocket-carrying space vehicles on Mars. Upon arrival, they send a fetch rover to obtain samples, blast them into space and deliver them to earthbound laboratories.

Matt Bowler

If scientists find proof that life once existed on Mars, that could change our conception of life in the universe, Meyer said.

What is life? What do we know? All we know is us, he said. We have one example. To any scientist one example is not enough to understand what constitutes the totality of what life is.

Finding life on Mars could show that there is nothing unique about life on Earth and that, in fact, the creation of life is just a natural part of a planets physical and chemical evolution.

If you have volcanoes, if you have water and you have these elements, given enough time, life will start. It could be that easy. We dont know, he said.

RELATED: San Diego Scientist Finds Relics Of Past Water In Martian Meteorite

The human relationship with imagined Martians dates back to the 19th century, when people talked about ways to communicate with Martians. David Brin, a science fiction author and NASA consultant, said Mars is just one of the logical places to look for life.

I think if we find life elsewhere, it would be a pretty cool thing, he said. And the number one candidate right now is not Mars, but the 10 ice-roofed water worlds we know we have in the solar system now.

Hes talking about worlds like Saturns moon Titan, and one of Jupiter's moons, Europa. Those moons either have or are believed to have liquid oceans.

Lets say we did find that life evolved on its own elsewhere that suggests that life is everywhere in the cosmos, he said. Bloody everywhere. And thats what I believe to be the case.

So far, astronomers have identified 5,000 exoplanets, so the possibilities are great. But for now, NASA and San Diego State researchers are focusing on our planetary neighbor, Mars.

Read the rest here:

San Diego researchers hope to find evidence of life on Mars - KPBS