Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez and Chris McKay Say the Vikings Probably DID Discover Organics on Mars

Episode Date: January 24, 2011

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Flash! Organics found on Mars, 35 years ago. That's this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. The paper in the December issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research ended with this line. Considering that the Viking landers did detect the presence of organics in the soil, we suggest that an in-situ life detection mission to Mars is essential in the near future. We'll talk with the lead author of that paper, Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez, and co-author

Chris McKay about their team's rewrite of the first attempt to find life on the red planet three and a half decades ago. Emily Lakdawalla is also studying Mars this week. She'll explain how a venerable camera circling that planet captures beautiful images, including a new one of Mars's moon Phobos. Bruce Betts has his head up in the stars again. He'll take us including a new one of Mars' moon Phobos. Bruce Betts has his head up in the stars again. He'll take us on a guided tour of the night sky and send a new space trivia contest our way. Somewhere above the Earth, a sail is circling. On Thursday night, January 20, NASA's NanoSail-D unfurled its 100 square meters of shiny, ultra-thin polymer.

Here's what Henk Hamouin of the Netherlands heard when he tuned into the NanoSail radio beacon on his amateur radio receiver. Henk was lucky to find the NanoSail signal. The experimental probe has no solar cells, and its batteries are now dead. While not really a solar sail, and with no means of changing its course, NanoSail-D has still demonstrated that a fairly large sail can be deployed from a very small package, a feat the Planetary Society hopes to duplicate with its more sophisticated LightSail-1. Bill Nye will have more to say about NanoSail-D after we hear from my favorite space blogger, Emily Lakdawalla.

Emily, you posted a very interesting article about Mars Express, but before we get to that, let's talk about the latest beautiful images from Cassini that you've put on the blog. Yeah, actually, I posted two animations from Cassini, one of the potato-shaped moon named Prometheus rotating, and another of two of the bigger round icy moons, Tethys and Dione, passing by each other. The first one was produced from data that's been returned to the archive, so it's the high-quality science data. and the other one is just produced from raw images from the Cassini website, which you can check out every day or every other day to see new pictures from Saturn. Both of these animations are great, and there's a game you can play with one of them, and all I can say is, I lost.

Yeah, it can be really hard to figure out where you're standing and how far things are away in space because you just have no reference points. Tell us a little bit about this thing on Mars Express called the HRSC and why you decided this was a good time to explain it. Well, HRSC is the main camera system on Europe's Mars Express, Mars Orbiter. It's a high-resolution color stereo imaging system, and it's the stereo part that makes it pretty unusual. There have actually been a lot of these push broom style cameras at Mars. A push broom camera is different from a framing camera. The kind of camera that you have in your pocket is probably a framing camera.

You take a snapshot, the image appears on a square detector, and it saves that file. But these push broom cameras that are on orbiters are just linear detectors, But these push broom cameras that are on orbiters are just linear detectors, and they're swept across the surface of Mars as the orbiter goes from south to north or north to south in its orbit. And it builds up these long, skinny image swaths, which is why all the images from the high-res images from Mars orbiters tend to be narrow and very, very long. So HRSC works very similarly to these other cameras, except for one difference. It has nine different detectors that all point in different directions. So HRSC works very similarly to these other cameras, except for one difference. It has nine different detectors that all point in different directions. Some of them point ahead of the spacecraft in its orbit, and some of them point behind. And what that allows HRSC to do is that as it passes over the same point, it images it from multiple different directions, which means that every spot that it takes a photograph

of on Mars, it can actually get stereo data on. It looks at it from two different directions, and they can combine that digitally to make a 3D elevation model. And the reason I was talking about it this week is because they happen to fly very close to Mars' inner moon, Phobos, and they use the same technique, and the result is five different views of Phobos all taken at nearly the same time from very different directions, and it kind of rotates in front of you. I should have an animation of this posted this week. And there is already a pretty spectacular image of Phobos right at the top of this article that inspired your explanation. That's right. This one is at a resolution of only 4 meters per pixel,

which is actually twice as good as Mars Express usually gets on Mars because it happened to pass two times closer to Phobos than it ever gets to the surface of Mars. So lots of great pictures on just the last week's blog entries, and I'm sure much more to come. Emily, as always, thanks. Thank you, Matt. Emily Lachtewal is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next is Bill, then we'll head for Mars and some 35-year-old data that has a new

lease on life. Hey, hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, executive director of the Planetary Society. And this week, very exciting news, NanoSail-D, the little satellite that could, came out of its shell, came out of its FASTSAT, which is an acronym about a small satellite that carries another satellite into Earth orbit. So NanoSail-D is this very small satellite that looks like an umbrella made of super shiny fabric. And it must have wiggled its way out over the last month. And that funny thing's happened in inertial space, in orbit.

It made its way out, and then it unfurled into this umbrella. And the purpose of the umbrella is to catch the tiny bit of atmosphere that is up there, even in outer space, and then slowly slow a spacecraft down so that it will fall out of the sky and burn up to de-orbit spacecraft. You see, spacecraft are sent up there with a little extra fuel and a little extra maneuvering ability so that they can take themselves out of orbit when they're worn out or their batteries are dead or the circuits are cooked by radiation or what have you.

But this way, it could be a lot cheaper. But wait, wait, there's more. When you have something this shiny in outer space, it gets pushed along by the strange but real momentum of light. Light has no mass. You can't feel light's weight on Earth. But it has momentum because it's pure energy. It's a relativity thing. Anyway, so NanoSail-D,

we all expect to get pushed along a little bit by light. It will be a solar sail, although one that they can't steer. So this is an exciting time. If this thing works, it'll make communication satellites, all sorts of things, cheaper, better, and faster, just as NASA's dream was a few years ago. And by the way, the Planetary Society supported this thing when they were going to not do it at all. The Planetary Society made a deal for some hardware and kind of kept the project going for a while until NASA picked it up again and ran this test. It sat in orbit for a month, all ready to come out. And then somehow a few days ago, boing, out it came, and it's sailing.

It's exciting. It's a very small step that may change the world. I've got to fly, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. I'm old enough to remember the thrill of the first soft landings on Mars. Vikings 1 and 2 arrived there in 1976. They were remarkably sophisticated spacecraft. Each carried a shovel to scoop up Martian soil and deposited in a miniature laboratory designed to detect both life and the building blocks of living material.

Sadly, even the best results were inconclusive. And one experiment, the Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer, or GCMS, failed to find the organic or carbon-based molecules it was looking for. In fact, scientists found compounds that made them think the instrument had been contaminated with chlorine-based cleaning fluids before the Vikings set out for Mars. Now, nearly 35 years later, new and astounding data indicates the GCMS found organics after all. Dr. Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez is a distinguished research professor

at the Laboratory of Plasma Chemistry and Planetary Studies. The lab is within the Institute of Plasma Chemistry and Planetary Studies. The lab is within the Institute of Nuclear Science at UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Rafael headed an experiment that subjected soil from Chile's forbidding Atacama Desert to the same sort of analysis conducted by the Viking GCMS, with one vastly important difference. He recently joined me on the phone from Mexico to talk about this experiment. Also in the conversation was an old friend of Planetary Radio, NASA Ames planetary scientist and astrobiologist Chris McKay, was one of Raphael's co-authors.

He spoke with us via Skype. Gentlemen, I am so happy to have you on. Well, I was going to say again, Chris, you've been on several times before, but Raphael, welcome to Planetary Radio, your first appearance on the show. And congratulations to both of you on this discovery, really, which I don't think is getting the media attention that it deserves, because it's quite significant. Chris, the first thing I thought when I read about these results was,

boy, I wish Carl Sagan had been around to read this paper. Well, it's interesting because the Viking results have been discussed for 30 more years, and one very curious feature is what wasn't there, or what we thought wasn't there. It's sort of the dog that didn't bark in the night. Why were there no organics? Why did the GCMS fail to detect organics? It's sort of the dog that didn't bark in the night. Why were there no organics? Why did the GCMS fail to detect organics? It's always been a puzzle. And I think now we finally have the solution to that puzzle. And the truth is that it did discover organics. We just didn't know

how to look for them properly because of these nasty perchlorates. That's right. It was, in a sense, the method used to detect the organics, burned them, destroyed them, and what Viking actually saw was part of the smoke, if you will, of the organics being destroyed. Rafael, we've got you on the telephone, of course, from Mexico. You were the lead author of this paper. The reanalysis of the Viking results suggests perchlorate and organics at mid-altitudes on Mars. This would seem to be, Rafael, another example of one of Earth's

most extreme environments, helping us learn more about another world. Yes, we have been working in the Atacama Desert for almost a decade, and this is a place that has all the characteristics that we had had for for mars using the viking resounds when we heated the soil from the atacana we find virtually no organics and there's no bacteria growing in the soil there's no dna and when the phoenix detected the presence of perchlorate in the Martian Arctic, we revisited the Viking resounds.

We spiked magnesium perchlorate into this extreme environment, the Atacama Desert. And this small amount of organics that were there were practically combusted. Surprisingly, we were able to detect chlorohydrocarbons, chloromethane and dichloromethane. And it turns out that the Viking did detect these compounds. However, they thought that they were terrestrial contaminants because it's unusual that when you hit a soil, you would expect to see organic compounds. In Mars, there were virtually no organic compounds detected, and it was only chlorohyrocarbons that they saw. And they thought that they were terrestrial contaminants because most of these compounds are typically used in laboratories to clean the instruments, to remove organics. And also, the isotopic distribution of the chlorine

matches the same as on the Earth. So based on these results, they thought that these were terrestrial contaminants, but it turns out, as Chris pointed out, this was the smoke coming from the combustion of the organics from the Martian surface. Chris, if we had realized what was going on 35 years ago, do you think that this might have affected the course of Mars exploration? Well, I think it certainly would have. If the GCMS on Viking had detected organics, then I think that would have been a very promising lead in terms of what to do next in the search for life. The fact that there were no organics seemed to slam the door shut on the search for life.

But I don't think we can fault the Viking team for this interpretation, because there was no way they could have guessed that the chlorine on Mars was in the form of perchlorate. There is no environment on Earth in which the dominant form of chlorine is perchlorate. And when it was discovered by Phoenix on Mars, it was to everyone's surprise. No one expected it. So if they had said, well, one explanation for our results is that the chlorine on Mars is perchlorate and it's destroying the organics and that's why we see what we see, no one would have believed it.

It would have had a big difference on how Mars exploration went, but even in retrospect, there's no way that we could have known it with the data that we had available at the time. Genwin, both of you have done a lot of work in extreme environments here on this planet. Rafael, what was the significance of doing this test, using soil from the Atacama? Well, this is a soil that has a property similar to Mars, a low organics in all bacteria. And this is the first one that we tried.

And surprisingly, we find these chlorocarbons. We have done additional tests on other extreme environments, like the dry valleys of the Antarctica. Surprisingly, here, if you spike it per chlorate, this soil, you don't see any chloro-hydrocarbon. So in that, we don't see. But in Mojave Desert or other deserts, we are able to see the higher concentrations of these chlorinated compounds. Something that still we don't understand is why Viking detected in one landing site chloromethane and in Viking landing two dich chloromethane, and in Viking landing 2, dichloromethane.

That is still unclear because the two sites are very similar, mineralogically speaking. The only difference is that the chlorine content in Viking landing site 1 is 1%, contrary to almost 1% in landing 2. We'll hear more from Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez and Chris McKay in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy

as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. Transcription by CastingWords and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio,

or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan.

We learned just a month ago that one of the most daring experiments ever conducted at Mars actually found organic compounds on that planet's surface nearly 35 years ago. That's the conclusion reached by lead author Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and his fellow scientists, including Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center. Chris, now that we have these results, where do we go from here? And does this say something about what Mars Science Laboratory curiosity should be looking for? Well, I think the most important lesson is we have to plan any search for organics

with the knowledge that there's likely to be perchlorate in the sample with the organics, which means that using heat to release the organics from the soil is probably not the way to go because that heat will activate the perchlorate, which will destroy the organics from the soil is probably not the way to go because that heat will activate the perchlorate, which will destroy the organics. Fortunately, the Mars Science Laboratory organic detector has a method for extracting organics based on liquids in addition to heat. So it has alternate modes. And so I think what we'll find is that the MSL, the Mars Science Laboratory organic system, will be able to see the organL, the Mars Science Laboratory Organic System, will be able to see the organics despite the perchlorate because it can extract the organics with these liquid modes. So we're in luck.

MSL will go to Mars at the end of this year, and it should be able to definitively confirm what we're suggesting here, which is that there were organics in the soil at Viking. MSL will see them very clearly in the liquid extraction mode. Rafael, do you concur? And what other kind of research now remains to be seen based on the results of this initial paper? I completely agree with Chris. I think one additional support is the reconfirmation of the chlorine isotopic ratio on Mars.

MSL was not designed to look for chlorine isotopes. However, because there is perchloric in the soil, it will be combusted, and there will be some chlorophyll compounds that will be able to be analyzed through MSL, and we will be able to derive the isotopic distribution of different sites than the Viking study. Chris, I'm going to ask you again, because we didn't really address it. Carl Sagan, when the Viking results came out, wasn't he one of those who said that, no, this is not as conclusive, the lack of organics as many scientists thought at the time?

I don't remember that, Matt. I don't know if there was any, at the time of Viking, I don't think there was any serious criticism of the Viking results because there was clear indication that the GCMS worked as designed. What we're saying is not that the GCMS did not work or worked in a different way, but that the release of organics from the oven was not what was expected. So I don't recall any credible discussion about the possibility that there were organics there that were not detected that should have been detected. Now, subsequently, people talked about organics that would have been too complex,

too refractory to be detected. But most of the focus was on postulating what could be destroying the organics, oxidants of some sort. And there was some discussion, oh, maybe these oxidants would not be so bad for life after all. So there was a lot of discussion, and I know Carl Sagan was involved in it, about still trying to imagine how life could survive on Mars despite some process that was destroying the organics. And surely Dr. Sagan would have been quite thrilled by the results of this paper that you and others have just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Gentlemen, I want to thank you very much and congratulate you once again on being part of this work.

Well, I think with these new returns, we should plan for missions to detect life itself on the Martian surface. I look forward to having you both back on the show when there is even more data available to us from the red planet. I'm sure that your searches will continue, and we'll all look forward to that touchdown of the Mars Science Laboratory curiosity that is not very far away. Let's hope that it confirms all of these results that it seems that Viking actually did discover 35 years ago. Thanks so much for joining us on Planetary Radio. Thank you. And we'll be right back with this week's edition of What's Up.

That's when Bruce Betts will join us for a look at the night sky and this week's trivia question in just a few moments. Bruce Betts is here once again on the Skype Connection. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. It's time for What's Up. He's going to tell us about the night sky. For the Planetary Society, it's time for What's Up. He's going to tell us about the night sky. And, brother, you can rest those weary vocal cords because we've got another little random space fact intro from Brandon Cook today.

Oh, thank goodness. What a relief, huh? So tell us, what's up in the night sky? Well, we've got Jupiter in the evening sky, but it's setting around 9 or 10 now over in the west. And it's still, if you're looking after sunset and before then, super bright star-like object, that would be Jupiter. Saturn, raising and rising around 11 midnight. And you'll find it over in the east at that time on January 25th. You can check out the moon near Saturn if you're having trouble finding it. Of course, it'll also be near the bright star Spica, which will be below Saturn at that time.

And in the pre-dawn sky, we've got Venus dominating over in the east, super bright. And the moon, the crescent moon, will make a lovely little pattern with Venus on both January 29th and the 30th. So check that out if you're up before dawn. Let us move on to this week in space history. A lot happened this week in space history, some really good, some really bad. We'll start with bad news. Both the Apollo 1 fire in 1967 killed three astronauts, and Challenger exploded in 1986, killing seven. In the following week, Columbia disaster occurred in 2003. Yeah, it's that week.

At least they don't actually all fall in the same week this time, but that happens often enough. So a moment of silence. To try to move us to some happier news, there are also a couple of really big happy anniversaries. One of them in 1986, Voyager 2 took its flyby of Uranus, giving us our only up-close-and-personal view of that system. And in 2004, Opportunity landed on Mars and began its epic voyage of discovery that's been going on ever since and continues. Well, you're right. That certainly tempers the bad news for this week. Let us move on, and I hear I get to rest my vocal cords. Once again, here is a little work from Brandon. This week on Random Time Fact, we'll examine the atomic decay of cesium-133,

the effects of time dilation on your lunch hour, and the period of inflation. Ah, Tim, what are you doing? Albert Einstein discovered that space and time are one and the same, two sides to the same coin. So, by his logic, a random space fact is a random time fact. Ah, Tim, that's not exactly what we're looking for here. I'm sorry. You're fired. That's it. I'm through with this job. You can keep your pay, and if that Bruce Betts guy whatever wants to do this thing,

he can do it himself. I'm through. I've had enough. Tim. Ah, Dr. Betts, please help us out once more. Sure, I'd be glad to. We're talking big rockets again. We just had the launch of the tallest rocket ever from the west coast of the U.S., at Vandenberg, with the Delta IV Heavy.

If we go back to what was the tallest rocket, of course, the answer, pretty obvious, because when it comes to big things, the answer is almost always Saturn V. True enough, true enough. But this was a big mother. I kind of wish I'd driven up to the central coast just to sort of witness the trail of this thing. I saw a picture in the paper today, and it's a monster. It is, but it pales in comparison to the Saturn V, at least in the parameter we're talking about today, which is height.

The Saturn V, 363 feet, 110 meters, a close second. There was another rocket that was nearly as tall as the Saturn V, the Soviet N-1. The only problem problem with Soviet N1, which was only six meters shorter, it failed four times and never made it to space. Well, they get points for trying. Do they? Not really. We'll go with yes. Anyway, we just might come back to something

related to this. Oh, alright. Foreshadowing once again. Going to go on to the trivia question, where we asked you, who of the Mercury 7 are still alive? How'd we do, Matt? Wow, this got a tremendous response. Maybe just because people still think so highly of these guys.

And of those seven guys, only two still survive. We got the answer from many people, including our winner this week, a first-time winner, Ashley Green of Shropshire in the United Kingdom. Ashley told us it was John Herschel Glenn Jr. and Malcolm Scott Carpenter. Happy birthday, by the way. Well, to both of them at some point this year, but John Glenn is going to turn 90. And it's also... Amazing. They both have birthdays this year?

It's incredible, isn't it? It's quite a coincidence that... I'm sorry, you were going to tell us something significant. It is also, of course, we are creeping up on the 50th anniversary of John Glenn's flight, the first orbital flight by any American. Well, happy birthday to them and everyone else who has a birthday during 2011. Thank you so much. You're welcome. For the next time, what are we giving away, Matt?

We can do one of those year in space calendars for 2011. Let's do a year in space and calendar, pretty pictures, brilliant articles, and the official source for this week in space history. Speaking of history, in history, so past or present, what is the tallest rocket, and I'm going to add the caveat that actually succeeded in getting something into space, the tallest rocket ever that is or was not American, Soviet, or Russian. The tallest rocket that was not American, Soviet, or Russian. Go to planetary.org slash radio to find out how to enter. I'm intrigued by this one. I want to look it up myself. You have until the 31st of January, Monday, January 31 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer

and win yourself a year in space calendar. Everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about big red buttons. Thank you, and good night. Red buttons. He was a and good night. Red buttons. He was a very funny guy. I miss him. Bruce Betts. He was indeed.

I don't know that he was that big. Bruce Betts is the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. The atmosphere of a planet circling a distant star has been analyzed for the first time. Next week, we'll talk with the scientists behind this work. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Clear skies. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова