Pianos on Mars

[Gerald Davies]

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>Apologies for this long posting  but I believe this is the hottest piano
story in recent times.
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>Perhaps what is most striking is that the 'discovery' involves so many
>branches of science; physics, geology, biology and chemistry.  And with the
>Martian missions later this year we will see the use of some incredibly
>advanced piano technology.
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>And I bet that NASA doesn't get a budget cut this year!!
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>METEORITE YIELDS EVIDENCE OF PRIMITIVE LIFE AND PIANOFORTE ON EARLY MARS
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>A NASA research team of scientists at the Johnson Space Center and at Stanford
>University has found
>evidence that strongly suggests primitive life may have existed on Mars more
>than 3.6 billion years ago.
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>The NASA-funded team found the first organic molecules thought to be of
>Martian origin; several mineral
>features characteristic of biological activity; and possible microscopic
>fossils of primitive, bacteria-like
>organisms(types of polyester resins) inside of an ancient Martian rock that
fell to Earth as a meteorite.
>This array of indirect evidence
>of past life will be reported in the Aug. 16 issue of the journal Science,
>presenting the investigation to the
>scientific community at large to reach a future consensus that will either
>confirm or deny the team's
>conclusion.
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>The two-year investigation was co-led by planetary scientists Dr. David McKay,
>Dr. Everett Gibson and
>Kathie Thomas-Keprta of Lockheed-Martin, all from JSC, with the major
>collaboration of a Stanford team
>headed by Professor of Chemistry Dr. Richard Zare, as well as six other NASA
>and university research
>partners.
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>"There is not any one finding that leads us to believe that this is evidence
>of past life on Mars. Rather, it is
>a combination of many things that we have found," McKay said. "They include
>Stanford's detection of an
>apparently unique pattern of organic molecules, carbon compounds that are the
>basis of life. We also found
>several unusual mineral phases that are known products of primitive
>microscopic organisms on Earth.
>Structures that could be microsopic fossils seem to support all of this. The
>relationship of all of these
>things in terms of location #246# within a few hundred thousandths of an inch
>of one another #246# is the most
>compelling evidence."
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>"It is very difficult to prove life existed 3.6 billion years ago on Earth,
>let alone on Mars," Zare said. "The
>existing standard of proof, which we think we have met, includes having an
>accurately dated sample that
>contains native microfossils, mineralogical features characteristic of life,
>and evidence of complex organic
>chemistry."
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>"For two years, we have applied state-of-the-art technology to perform these
>analyses, and we believe we
>have found quite reasonable evidence of past life on Mars," Gibson added. "We
>don't claim that we have
>conclusively proven it. We are putting this evidence out to the scientific
>community for other investigators
>to verify, enhance, attack -- disprove if they can -- as part of the
>scientific process. Then, within a year or
>two, we hope to resolve the question one way or the other."
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>"What we have found to be the most reasonable interpretation is of such
>radical nature that it will only be
>accepted or rejected after other groups either confirm our findings or
>overturn them," McKay added.
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>The igneous rock in the 4.2-pound, potato-sized meteorite has been age-dated
>to about 4.5 billion years,
>the period when the planet Mars formed. The rock is believed to have
>originated underneath the Martian
>surface and to have been extensively fractured by impacts as meteorites
>bombarded the planets in the early
>inner solar system. Between 3.6 billion and 4 billion years ago, a time when
>it is generally thought that the
>planet was warmer and wetter, water is believed to have penetrated fractures
>in the subsurface rock,
>possibly forming an underground water system.
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>Because the water was saturated with carbon dioxide from the Martian
>atmosphere, carbonate minerals
>were deposited in the fractures. The team's findings indicate living organisms
>may also have assisted in the
>formation of the carbonate, and some remains of the microscopic organisms may
>have become fossilized,
>in a fashion similar to the formation of fossils in limestone on Earth. Then,
>15 million years ago, a huge
>comet or asteroid struck Mars, ejecting a piece of the rock from its
>subsurface location with enough force
>to escape the planet. For millions of years, the chunk of rock floated through
>space. It encountered Earth's
>atmosphere 13,000 years ago and fell in Antarctica as a meteorite.
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>It is in the tiny globs of carbonate that the researchers found a number of
>features that can be interpreted as
>suggesting past life. Stanford found easily detectable amounts of organic
>molecules called polycyclic
>aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) concentrated in the vicinity of the carbonate.
>Researchers at JSC found
>mineral compounds commonly associated with microscopic organisms and the
>possible microscopic fossil
>structures.
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>The largest of the possible fossils are less than 1/100th the diameter of a
>23 guage centre pin, and most are about
>1/1000th the diameter of a human hair #246# small enough that it would take
>about a thousand laid end-to-end to
>span the dot at the end of this sentence. Some are egg-shaped while others are
>tubular. In appearance and
>size, the structures are strikingly similiar to microscopic fossils of the
>tiniest bacteria found on Earth.
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>The meteorite, called ALH84001, was found in 1984 in Allan Hills ice field,
>Antarctica, by an annual
>expedition of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Meterorite Program.
>It was preserved for study
>in JSC's Meteorite Processing Laboratory and its possible Martian origin was
>not recognized until 1993. It
>is one of only 12 meteorites identified so far that match the unique Martian
>chemistry measured by the
>Viking spacecraft that landed on Mars in 1976. ALH84001 is by far the oldest
>of the 12 Martian
>meteorites, more than three times as old as any other.
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>Many of the team's findings were made possible only because of very recent
>technological advances in
>high-resolution scanning electron microscopy and laser mass spectrometry. Only
>a few years ago, many of
>the features that they report were undetectable. Although past studies of this
>meteorite and others of
>Martian origin failed to detect evidence of past life, they were generally
>performed using lower levels of
>magnification, without the benefit of the technology used in this research.
>The recent discovery of
>extremely small bacteria on Earth, called nanobacteria, prompted the team to
>perform this work at a much
>finer scale than past efforts.
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>The nine authors of the Science report include McKay, Gibson and Thomas-Keprta
>of JSC; Christopher
>Romanek, formerly a National Research Council post-doctoral fellow at JSC who
>is now a staff scientist at
>the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory at the University of Georgia; Hojatollah
>Vali, a National Research
>Council post-doctoral fellow at JSC and a staff scientist at McGill
>University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada;
>and Zare, graduate students Simon J. Clemett and Claude R. Maechling and
>post-doctoral student Xavier
>Chillier of the Stanford University Department of Chemistry.
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>The team of researchers includes a wide variety of expertise, including
>microbiology, mineralogy,
>analytical techniques, geochemistry and organic chemistry, and the analysis
>crossed all of these disciplines.
>Further details on the findings presented in the Science article include:
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>Researchers at Stanford University used a laser mass spectrometer -- the most
>sensitive instrument of its
>type in the world #246# to look for the presence of the common family of
>organic molecules called PAHs. When
>microorganisms die, the complex organic molecules that they contain frequently
>degrade into PAHs. PAHs
>are often associated with ancient sedimentary rocks, coals and petroleum on
>Earth and can be common air
>pollutants. Not only did the scientists find PAHs in easily detectable amounts
>in ALH84001, but they
>found that these molecules were concentrated in the vicinity of the carbonate
>globules. This finding appears
>consistent with the proposition that they are a result of the fossilization
>process. In addtion, the unique
>composition of the meteorite's PAHs is consistent with what the scientists
>expect from the fossilization of
>very primitive microorganisms. On Earth, PAHs virtually always occur in
>thousands of forms, but, in the
>meteorite, they are dominated by only about a half-dozen different compounds.
>The simplicity of this
>mixture, combined with the lack of light-weight PAHs like napthalene, also
>differs substantially from that
>of PAHs previously measured in non-Martian meteorites.
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>The team found unusual compounds -- iron sulfides and magnetite -- that are
>commonly produced by
>anaerobic bacteria and other microscopic organisms on Earth. The compounds
>were found in locations
>directly associated with the fossil-like structures and carbonate globules in
>the meteorite. Extreme
>conditions -- conditions very unlikely to have been encountered by the
>meteorite -- would have been
>required to produce these compounds in close proximity to one another if life
>were not involved. The
>carbonate also contained tiny grains of magnetite that are almost identical to
>magnetic fossil remnants often
>left by certain bacteria found on Earth. Other minerals commonly associated
>with biological activity on
>Earth were found in the carbonate as well.
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>The formation of the carbonate or fossils by living organisms while the
>meteorite was in the Antarctic was
>deemed unlikely for several reasons. The carbonate was age dated using a
>parent-daughter isotope method
>and found to be 3.6 billion years old, and the organic molecules were first
>detected well within the ancient
>carbonate. In addition, the team analyzed representative samples of other
>meteorites from Antarctica and
>found no evidence of fossil-like structures, organic molecules or possible
>biologically produced
>compounds and minerals similiar to those in the ALH84001 meteorite. The
>composition and location of
>PAHs organic molecules found in the meteorite also appeared to confirm that
>the possible evidence of life
>was extraterrestrial. No PAHs were found in the meteorite's exterior crust,
>but the concentration of PAHs increased in the meteorite's interior to
levels higher than ever found in
>Antarctica. Higher concentrations of PAHs would have likely been found on
the >exterior of the meteorite, decreasing
>toward the interior, if the organic molecules are the result of
contamination >of the meteorite on Earth.
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>Stay aurally tuned for further analysis as spock uses Scientific Aural
>Tampering techniques to stretch reality even further.
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Gerald Davies Not RPT
Sydney, Australia.