Scientists find methane in Mars meteorites

An international team of researchers has discovered traces of methane in Martian meteorites, a possible clue in the search for life on the Red Planet.



The researchers examined samples from six meteorites of volcanic rock that originated on Mars. The meteorites contain gases in the same proportion and with the same isotopic composition as the Martian atmosphere. All six samples also contained methane, which was measured by crushing the rocks and running the emerging gas through a mass spectrometer. The team also examined two non-Martian meteorites, which contained lesser amounts of methane.

The discovery hints at the possibility that methane could be used as a food source by rudimentary forms of life beneath the Martian surface. On Earth, microbes do this in a range of environments.

"Other researchers will be keen to replicate these findings using alternative measurement tools and techniques," said co-author Sean McMahon, a Yale University postdoctoral associate in the Department of Geology and Geophysics. "Our findings will likely be used by astrobiologists in models and experiments aimed at understanding whether life could survive below the surface of Mars today."

The discovery was part of a joint research project led by the University of Aberdeen, in collaboration with the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre, the University of Glasgow, Brock University in Ontario, and the University of Western Ontario.

"One of the most exciting developments in the exploration of Mars has been the suggestion of methane in the Martian atmosphere," said University of Aberdeen professor John Parnell, who directed the research. "Recent and forthcoming missions by NASA and the European Space Agency, respectively, are looking at this, however, it is so far unclear where the methane comes from, and even whether it is really there. However, our research provides a strong indication that rocks on Mars contain a large reservoir of methane."

Co-author Nigel Blamey, of Brock University, said the team plans to expand its research by analyzing additional meteorites.

Yale's McMahon noted that the team's approach may prove helpful in future Mars rover experiments. "Even if Martian methane does not directly feed microbes, it may signal the presence of a warm, wet, chemically reactive environment where life could thrive," McMahon said.
Source: http://phys.org/

Thieves Steal Massive Meteorite Worth $12,000 From Australian Museum

Crystal Caves museum owner believes the theft of 12kg Wolf Creek specimen was more about pursuing an object of desire than its monetary value.




A rare meteorite the size of a soccer ball has been stolen from a Queenslandmuseum whose owner suspects the work of an unscrupulous collector.

The 11.25kg space rock, worth more than $16,000, was stolen from the Crystal Caves museum in Atherton, north Queensland, early on Monday.

The museum’s owner, Ghislanie Gallo, said she believed the theft – which police suspected was carried out by two men in hooded jumpers with white masks – was less about the meteorite’s value than it being an object of desire among a narrow group of enthusiasts.

The meteorite was only recently donated to the museum, which is permitted to display it but not sell it.

The rare specimen was discovered in Wolf Creek in Western Australia in 1973, the year before the area was declared a national park and all meteorites subsequently found deemed property of the crown.

Gallo said she understood it was illegal to take Australian meteorites out of the country. Media attention generated by the theft also meant “it’s going to be pretty hard to shift”.

“There’s a big part of me that’s hoping whoever did is freaking out right now and is going to dump it at my back gate. That would be the ideal outcome,” she said.

CCTV footage of the suspected thieves obtained by police has fuelled Gallo’s suspicion that “whoever broke in was doing it for somebody else”.

“Somebody who really wanted it found a couple of hoodlums and said, ‘I’ll give you a couple of grand to break into Crystal Caves and steal this thing’,” she said. “They probably had no idea what it was and what it was worth to a collector.

“People that are into this stuff – it’s from outer space and people have all these metaphysical ideas about properties of things from outer space.

“Who knows, maybe it was a nutter with enough cash to pay somebody to go and steal it from them?”

Gallo said she had been approached by a collector at her Cairns shop several months ago wanting to buy a smaller Wolf Creek meteorite she had.

“I said, I’m not selling it to you, it’s not for sale,” she said.

“Then we got this much bigger meteorite donated to us and we did get a bit of TV publicity from that. You start thinking about people like that and you go, maybe it’s a case of ‘you won’t sell me one, I’ll just help myself’. I don’t know.”

Atherton police senior sergeant Richard Trotter said he understood the value of the meteorite was not widely known in the town before the robbery.

“Would you know what a meteorite is worth? Because I certainly didn’t,” Trotter said.

“It’s an unusual thing for somebody to go to that much trouble to steal. And it would stand out certainly if somebody put it up on eBay, wouldn’t it? I can’t imagine it being that easy to move on for any sort of profit. It’s a very strange thing to see, to be honest.”

Trotter said no information from the public had yet been forthcoming. He renewed an appeal to hear from anyone “who might know the faces on the camera or have heard something or seen something or been offered a piece of the meteorite”.

Astronomy expert David Reneke, from Australasian Science magazine, told the ABC the meteorite could be broken up into smaller pieces and sold on the black market.


“These things are valuable for a lot of reasons, not only because of the mineralogy but because of what they represent,” he said.

“These bits of rock are usually between 4.5bn and 5bn years old. They come from a place between Mars and Jupiter and if you ever wanted a pristine part of a planet like Earth, this is where you go.”

Gallo said she believed there was “no way” a thief who had any appreciation of meteorites would break it up for sale.


“I don’t think it’s about the value. I think a collector wanted it,” she said.

“Why would you bust up a perfect specimen into little pieces? That would break my heart if that happened. That’s like breaking up the Mona Lisa and selling it in bits.”




Source: theguardian.com

Attention treasure-hunters! €10k pieces of meteorite fall in Ireland

An Irish person could be in for a cash windfall after pieces of meteorite worth up to €10,000 each fell from the skies at the weekend.


Hundreds of people witnessed a fireball streaking across the Irish skies at approximately 10.10pm on Sunday evening.

According to David Moore, editor of the Astronomy Ireland magazine, each piece of meteorite could fetch up to ten times the price of gold in the collectors' market.

At the current price of gold, this means that a piece of meteorite rock weighing approximately 28 grams could make the lucky person a cool €10,000.

It is believed that two meteorites land in Ireland every year, but they are rarely visible to the naked eye.

Astronomy Ireland have received hundreds of reports of the sighting, with coast guards in the south-west of the country getting mistaken reports of 'flares being released'.

Experts believe this meteorite, seen streaking from Kerry towards Donegal, could have been as large as a car while still whole.

"There is a chance some parts of this meteorite survive, and we think it may have fallen somewhere in the north of the country," Astronomy Ireland's David Moore told RTE Radio One's Morning Ireland as he appealed for people to share their stories of the sighting.

"We'd ask people to get in contact with us while it's still fresh in their mind. Check your CCTV cameras if you have them, a photographic report would be worth hundreds of eye witness reports," he said.

"The price of meteorites and what they're worth would come from the collectors and what they're prepared to pay," he continued.

"It is a big trade and Irish meteorites are very rare. It's a small island, this doesn't happen very often."

David recalled the last time a meteorite was recovered in Ireland in Loughlinbridge in Co Carlow in 1999.

"Pieces were found in north Co Carlow, the collector who bought some of them wanted to stay anonymous, but they were being bought for ten times the price of gold," Mr Moore said.


"However, we're not interested in the commercial value, we're interested in the fact that these are scientific specimens."

If people do go hunting in their local fields for the pieces of precious rock, Mr Moore advised them to look closely.

"The rocks might like they are nothing special," he said.

"The earth is effectively built up of billions of meteorites, but because they've been through the re-entry they'll be melted with a dark fusion crust.

"If they've been cracked open, they look like crystallised structures, some parts look like metal, other parts may look like coal. It would be like a burnt-looking rock looking out of place on the ground."

Mr Moore said Astronomy Ireland are seeking for people to fill out the report form on Astronomy.ie (click here).

Source: independent.ie/irish-news

Building blocks of the run-up to life recreated in space-like conditions

Researchers have reproduced a wide array of building blocks for life in a prebiotic scenario involving meteorites and the solar wind.

They began with formamide, a simple organic compound that's ubiquitous in the universe. Formamide has been detected in galactic centers, star-forming regions, interstellar space, as well as comets and satellites.
They then added meteorite powder as a catalyst, and irradiated the solution with high-energy proton beams to simulate the solar wind. They obtained a rich blend of complex biological molecules including amino acids, carboxylic acids, sugars, and nucleobases (the basic building blocks for DNA and RNA).
Among the products were also the nucleosides cytidine, uridine, adenosine, and thymidine, which are more advanced building blocks consisting of a nucleobase linked to a sugar molecule. Nucleosides are notoriously difficult to recreate under prebiotic conditions.
"We were very surprised to see those," says Raffaele Saladino of Tuscia University, Italy.
The ingredients for life have previously been recreated under a variety of possible terrestrial scenarios involving lightning, ultraviolet radiation,
hydrothermal vents, or meteorite impacts. The new findings expand the range of possibilities to prebiotic environments beyond the early Earth, including to the small, wandering bodies of our solar system.
The results were published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


SOLAR WIND POWER
The team had previously synthesized some of the building blocks (but no nucleosides) by subjecting formamide to very high temperatures, simulating conditions near volcanoes or upon meteorite impact on the early Earth.
By instead irradiating formamide with high-energy protons, they obtained a higher yield of amino acids and nucleobases, as well as other relevant biomolecules including the nucleosides.
"Proton chemistry goes one step farther than heat chemistry," says study co-author Ernesto Di Mauro of the University of Rome La Sapienza."Proton radiation turns out to be amazingly efficient."
He adds: "Carbon chemistry works the same anywhere in the universe, and every star produces solar wind. This tells us that life could well be universal."
Interestingly, the scenario produced a high quantity of precursors for both metabolic and genetic pathways (the carboxylic acids and nucleobases respectively.) An ongoing debate with the origin of life is whether metabolism or genetics emerged first. Here, the findings suggest that both processes could have emerged simultaneously.


METEORITES AS REACTORS
Other findings have also suggested that meteorites may have seeded the ingredient for life on the early Earth, notably during the late heavy bombardment, a period when the inner planets were pummeled by frequent impacts about 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago. In particular, some simple amino acids, sugars, and nucleobases have been found inside meteorites, albeit in very small proportions.
Here, the researchers wanted to go beyond the idea of meteorites as mere carriers of organic molecules.
They tested the catalytic properties of eleven meteorites belonging to the four major classes—iron, stony iron, chondrites, and achondrites—but first treated the rock powder to remove any trace of organics.
They found that the minerals within the meteorites were necessary to catalyze the synthesis of the molecules, with the stony iron, chondrite, and achondrite meteorites more active than the iron meteorites as a general trend. They also tested individual minerals present in the meteorites and found that the full powder was needed for full catalytic effect.
"Meteorites are not merely shuttles for organics, as suggests the common point of view," Saladino says. "They are also reactors that can synthesize biomolecules during their lives."


THE CATCH
The findings come with an important caveat. "I'm extremely enthusiastic about this piece of work because they obtained much more than the nucleobases," says Steven Benner, an origin-of-life chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution at the Westheimer Institute in Gainesville, Fla.
"They combined formamide and rock chemistry and got so many building blocks—that's what makes this paper important." "But the catch is that the total mass of meteorite that's coming in after the Moon-forming event is negligible," he adds.
"You can't rely on the Late Heavy Bombardment to bring you much in terms of organics. Besides, that amount of carbon is negligible compared to what's here on Earth already."
Indeed, formamide, the starting molecule in their experiment, is readily made from hydrogen cyanide and water — two compounds that were abundant on the early Earth. "My view is that we have to solve the problem with what's here on Earth before we go looking at meteorites," Benner said, "just because of the amount of material that's coming in."

NASA's Astrobiology Magazine at astrobio.net

Fonte: bangaloremirror.com

NASA: We’ll find alien life in 10 to 20 years

Are we alone in the universe? Top NASA scientists say the answer is almost certainly “no.”

“I believe we are going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth in the next decade and definitive evidence in the next 10 to 20 years,” Ellen Stofan, chief scientist for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said at a public panel Tuesday in Washington.

“We know where to look, we know how to look, and in most cases we have the technology,” she said.

Jeffery Newmark, interim director of heliophysics at the agency put it this way: “It’s definitely not an if, it’s a when.”

However, if visions of alien invasions are dancing in your head, you can let those go.

“We are not talking about little green men,” Stofan said. “We are talking about little microbes.”

Over the course of an hourlong presentation, NASA leaders described a flurry of recent discoveries that suggest we are closer than ever to figuring out where we might find life in the solar system and beyond.

For example, Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA, cited a study that analyzed the atmosphere above Mars’ polar ice caps and suggests that 50 percent of the planet’s northern hemisphere once had oceans up to a mile deep, and that it had that water for a long period of time — up to 1.2 billion years.

“We think that long period of time is necessary for life to get more complex,” Stofan said.

She added that getting human field geologists and astrobiologists on Mars would greatly improve the chances of finding fossils of past life on our nearest planetary neighbor.

Green also described another recent study that used measurements of aurora on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede to prove it has a large liquid ocean beneath its icy crust.

The findings suggest that previous ideas about where to find “habitable zones” may have been too limited. (A body considered to in a habitable zone is not too hot or too cold for liquid water to exist on its surface.)

“We now recognize that habitable zones are not just around stars, they can be around giant planets too,” Green said. “We are finding out the solar system is really a soggy place.”

He also talked NASA’s plans for a mission to Europa, another moon of Jupiter with an icy ocean.

“I don’t know what we are going to find there,” he said.

Newmark described how NASA is learning more about the role of Earth’s magnetic field in protecting our planet’s water and atmosphere from being blown away by the solar wind, thereby playing a role in the ability for life to develop.

“Mars does not have a significant magnetic field, so it lets the wind strip away the water and atmosphere,” he said.

Paul Hertz, director of astrophysics at NASA, talked about how future telescopes already in the works will help scientists scan the atmospheres of large rocky planets around distant stars for chemical markers of life.

“We are not just studying water and habitability in our solar system, but also looking for it in planets around other stars,” he said.

NASA associate administrator John Grunsfeld, said part of what excites him most about the search for life beyond our planet is to see what that life looks like.

“Once we get beyond Mars, which formed from the same stuff as Earth, the likelihood that life is similar to what we find on this planet is very low,” he said.

Grunsfeld said he believes that life beyond Earth will be found by the next generation of scientists and space explorers, but Green said he hopes it is sooner than that.

“The science community is making enormous progress,” he said. “And I’ve told my team I’m planning to be the director of planetary science when we discover life in the solar system."

Source: msn.com/en-us/news/technology/nasa

Largest-ever meteorite crater found in Australian outback

Scientists have discovered two deep scars in the earth's crust in outback Australiathat are believed to mark the remains of a meteorite crater with a 250-mile diameter – the largest ever found.


The scars are each more than 120 miles in diameter and are believed to mark the spot where a meteorite split into two, moments before it slammed into earth.


The impact is believed to have occurred more than 300 million years ago.


Scientists discovered a scar from the meteorite five years ago – it was then thought to be from the third largest crater ever found – but now say there are two sets of remains.


Dr Andrew Glikson, from the Australian National University, said the structures could have resulted from a single meteorite which split.


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The crater itself has long since disappeared but samples from the twin scars were discovered deep beneath the ground during drilling as part of geothermal research.

"The two asteroids must each have been over ten kilometres [six miles] across – it would have been curtains for many life species on the planet at the time," he said.

"Large impacts like these may have had a far more significant role in the Earth's evolution than previously thought."

Evidence of the impact zone was found more than 1.2 miles underground in the Warburton Basin, near the borders of the states of South Australia and Queensland and the Northern Territory.

Dr Glikson said the date of the impact was unclear but it probably occurred more than 300 million years ago.

"It's a mystery – we can't find an extinction event that matches these collisions," he said. "I have a suspicion the impact could be older than 300 million years."

The surrounding rocks are 300 to 600 million years old but are not accompanied by a layer of sediment which contains evidence of a mass extinction; such layers are typically found near large meteorite strikes.

The research has been published in the journal Tectonophysics.

"These are deeply buried impact structures," Dr Glikson said.

"When a large impact occurs the crater's contents are blown into the atmosphere, although relics of the crater may in some instances be preserved."

Ten largest craters previously found on Earth

1. Vredefort

South Africa

100 miles diameter

South-West of Johannesburg, the Vredefort Dome was created over 2,000 million years ago when a meteorite struck earth. It is the oldest crater made by either a meteorite or a comet and it is reportedly the site of the largest energy release in the world’s history.


The multiple-ringed Vredefort Crater in South Africa (Nasa)

2. Chicxulub

Mexico

93 miles

The Chicxulub crater is buried beneath Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. It was created by an asteroid and its impact is expected to have caused earthquakes, megatsunami, global firestorms and aerosol clouds. Many scientists believe it played a major role in the “KT Extinction Event” which caused dinosaurs to become extinct.


Remnants of the Chicxulub impact crater (Getty)

3. Sudbury

Canada

81 miles

Scientists have debated whether the Sudbury crater was caused by a comet or an asteroid. Research published at the tail-end of last year suggests it was a comet – comets are made predominantly of ice, whereas asteroids are made of rock. Created 1.8 million years ago, the crater is now a valuable source of gold, copper, nickel, palladium and other metals.


Sudbury Basin in Canada (Alamy)

4. Popigai

Russia

56 miles

The Popigai crater sits in northern Siberia. It was created by an asteroid and the impact was powerful enough to send debris flying into other continents. In the 1970s, the USSR discovered the crater contained trillions of carats of “impact diamonds” - used for industry and science.


The Popigai crater in Russia (www.passc.net)

5. Acraman

Australia

56 miles

Nearly 600 million years ago, an asteroid hit what is now South Australia. Over time, the crater has been eroded but Lake Acraman, a dry lake, marks its location.


Lake Acraman, a small, shallow salt lake in the arid Australian outback (Nasa)

6. Manicouagan

Canada

53 miles

Quebec’s Lake Manicouagan is a remnant of one of the largest impact craters still preserved on the earth’s surface. Scientists believe it was created by a 5-km-wide asteroid over 200 million years ago. Today, the lake serves as a reservoir and it is an important spot for salmon fishing.

7. Morokweng

South Africa

43 miles

Hidden beneath the Kalahari Desert is the Morokweng crater. It was formed by an asteroid, which is estimated to have been between 5 and 10km wide. In 2006 scientists drilling in the area discovered a beachball-sized fossil meteorite which had survived the collision.

8. Kara

Russia

40 miles

The heavily eroded Kara crater has been linked to the nearby Ust-Kara crater. There is dispute whether the two craters were formed separately or if they were formed in a single impact event. If they were considered together, they would form one of the largest craters on earth of 120km.

9. Beaverhead

USA

37 miles

The Beaverhead crater spans central Idaho and western Montana. It is estimated to be 600 million years old. Although the crater has become weathered, there are geological features such as shatter cones and shocked rocks.

10. Tookoonooka

Australia

34 miles

Australia has over 30 impact craters discovered so far. Located in Queensland, Tookoonooka was discovered in the 1980s when the area was undergoing petroleum exploration.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

Cosmologists spends month searching for meteorites in Anarctica

Every austral summer, a group of volunteers heads off to a remote region of Antarctica to set up a field camp on the ice. For the next month, they search the ice and nearby debris piles left by glaciers for dark rocks that might be extraterrestrial in origin. The program is called the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET).



ANSMET has been led for the past 20 years by geologist Ralph Harvey of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. The National Science Foundation (NSF) supports field operations, NASA curates the recovered meteorites, and the Smithsonian Institution provides long-term curation facilities for the collection.

Over the years many Washington University in St. Louis geologists, physicists and astrophysicists have volunteered to help. This year it was the turn of Christine Floss, a research professor of physics in Arts & Sciences,

Why do scientists look for meteorites in Antarctica?

Meteorites don't fall more often in Antarctica than in other parts of the world, but in Antarctica those falling on high-altitude ice fields are carried by flowing ice toward the ocean. Some of the ice streams run up against barriers such as the Transantarctic Mountains and are blocked. Wind erosion then slowly brings stones embedded in the ice—sometimes for hundreds of thousands of years—to the surface. It is this concentration mechanism that makes Antarctica a great place to look for meteorites.

It is also true that the dark stones show up well against the blue ice, the heavily compressed glacial ice that looks blue because there are no bubbles in it. But this year we found more meteorites in moraines than we did on the ice, even though they're much harder to find there.

When did the search for meteorites in Antarctica begin?

In the 1970s a Japanese team picked up 10 or 20 meteorites at random, and when they were examined, they turned out to be of many different types—not just many fragments of a few meteorites.

Bill Cassidy, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, realized that this meant some kind of concentration mechanism was at work. He began to write proposals to the NSF asking the foundation to fund systematic searches. It took him three years, but he got funding in the end and the program has now been running for 38 years.

ANSMET is basically a service project. Scientists help find the meteorites but the stones are then shipped to NASA's Johnson Space Center, which makes them available to scientists who want to study them, and, eventually, to the Smithsonian Institution.




How important has the annual hunt been for science?

It has totally revolutionized the way people think about meteorites and what can be learned from them.


For example, the first lunar meteorites were found in Antarctica and that discovery was pivotal in convincing people that, yes, meteorites could be ejected from a large body—not just the little asteroids but also a large planet—and launched on a trajectory that will bring them to Earth.

People had found meteorites elsewhere that they thought were Martian, but the orbital dynamics folks said there's no way you can get a meteorite from Mars to land on Earth. The fact that rocks could make it from the moon to Antarctica meant that the orbital dynamics models needed to be revised.

So what's important is not that we collect lots of meteorites but that we find more of the rare and interesting ones.

What was a day like?

All eight of us had Ski-Doos, and we'd line them up, evenly spaced, on the ice, and sweep an area. If anyone saw something that looked like a meteorite, they stopped, waved, and everyone walked over to document and collect the stone. Then we returned to our Ski-Doos and kept driving.

Other days we'd drive over to a moraine and walk around the moraine looking. We'd plant a flag whenever we found a meteorite and then come back to collect them all.

What were you looking for?

A shiny fusion crust—a thin, glassy coating that forms when a meteoroid entering Earth's atmosphere gets hot enough that its surface melts and refreezes.

I found some meteorites, but nowhere nearly as many as our mountaineer Johnny Schutt, who's been doing this since 1980. He spotted one after another.

Why do you need mountaineers?


To stop us from doing anything stupid like falling in crevasses, but they were also the ones who did all of the organizational work for our month-long camping expedition.

I had very little camping experience before going on this trip; basically two weeks at a KOA. I didn't mention that to Ralph Harvey, the principal investigator, when I applied for the program. I told him when we met in the Dallas airport on the outbound leg.

Apparently he told absolutely everyone else on the team, because they all knew.

I hear you set a collection record.

One member of the team was Ryan Zeigler, who earned his master's and doctorate in geology at Washington University and is now the lunar sample curator at the Johnson Space Center. He wanted to break the record for the number of meteorites collected in one day.


Nobody knew exactly what the record was but we thought it was about 100. One moraine was amazing; you couldn't turn around without finding a meteorite. And Ryan was a man with a mission. We found 172 stones that day.

How many did the team find in all?

We found 562 in total, which may sound like a lot, but an earlier search of the same area had found 900 or so. On the other hand, we had a lot of bad weather days when white-outs or strong winds kept us holed up in our tents.

Would you do it again?

I loved it. It was so beautiful there and I had such a good time.


Provided by Washington University in St. Louis



Source: http://phys.org/