The search for life on Mars may have just gotten a whole lot more complicated.
. So they're not a definitive sign of life, but finding them on Mars would be another clue pointing to life's possible emergence there, once upon a time.
Pavlov and his team wanted to better understand the likelihood of finding evidence of amino acids on the Martian surface, so they designed an experiment to test the hardiness of these compounds. They mixed amino acids with mineral mixes designed to simulate Mars soil, consisting of silica, hydrated silica, or silica and perchlorates , and sealed them in test tubes mimicking the Martian atmosphere, at a variety of Mars-like temperatures.Then, the team irradiated the samples with ionizing gamma radiation, to mimic the dose of cosmic radiation expected on Mars' surface over a period of about 80 million years.
"Our work is the first comprehensive study where the destruction of a broad range of amino acids was studied under a variety of Mars-relevant factors and the rates of radiolysis were compared,""It turns out that the addition of silicates and particularly silicates with perchlorates greatly increases the destruction rates of amino acids."
That means that any amino acids on the Martian surface earlier than about 100 million years ago are probably long gone, irradiated into nothing., rather than millions – the few centimeters that Curiosity and Perseverance can dig down to is unlikely to pony up amino acids.
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