First photo of Mars from rover Spirit. Press release by NASA on January 06, 2004.
The environment is too sandy, too arid... extremely eroded, as if the wind in Mars were unusually strong... Indeed, the dusty wind causes a deeper erosion than the clean wind. Besides, we have to add the highly oxidizing agents of Martian dust.
We are satisfied by the results obtained by the rover Spirit on Martian soil.
One of the experiments that the rover carried out was crucial to know whether Mars had water on its surface in an earlier period.
The explorer’s laboratory performed analyses of Mar’s soil and rocks looking for carbonates or traces of water.
On Earth, the carbonates are formed by reaction of water, carbon dioxide and some soil minerals, or by means of metabolic functions performed by living beings. We do not know if there is another process of inorganic synthesis of carbonates on Earth.
The results were encouraging at the beginning for the reason that the explorer had found residues of carbonates that we thought that could have formed only in presence of water. But this conclusion was discarded some weeks later when a group of astrophysicists discovered that the carbonates can be autosynthesized in environments that lack water, for example, in the interplanetary nebulae.
Our solar system receives a permanent precipitation of carbonates originated in the interplanetary space and in the extrasolar nebulae. However, under no circumstances the presence of water on Mars will substantiate the hypothesis about the existence of primitive or current living forms on the red planet. We must find vestiges of ancient or modern living beings to declare that there is life on Mars.
We know about the technical difficulties that we face to detect microscopic living beings on other worlds out from Earth, but we are finding new and unambiguous ways to seek for extraterrestrial life.
For example, we can detect life on other planets by means of the identification of products unmistakably implied in the PMF; for example, ATP Synthase, ADP (Adenosine Diphosphate), ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate), NADP (Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide Phosphate), FAD (Flavin Adenine Dinucleotide), C Cytochrome, etc., through the Spectrometry of Masses by Ionization and Agglutination of Electroatomization into a Vacuum Chamber.
The device of spectrometry permits to analyze any substratum without a preliminary separation of the materials that we are trying to find. The device sprays a specific ionizer solvent toward the substratum that is analyzed. The ions separated from the substratum are trapped by a vacuum chamber that directs them toward a small mass spectrometer for their identification.
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