Tim Dodd: Hi, it's me, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut.
Yes, great news.
NASA announced something really exciting to day.
And no, it's not quite life on Mars for sure at all, but it is a really good sign that
we're on track to actually discover life on Mars.
For those of you that are unaware, NASA launched the Curiosity Mars rover that landed in August
of 2012.
It's been exploring Mars for almost six years.
And actually, it's already found quite a few organic compounds.
And organic compounds, they don't always correlate to life, but they're a pretty good sign that
we're on track.
So we'd still have to find that direct correlation that these organic materials actually mean
life.
Tim Dodd: But it sounds like we're definitely figuring out more and more about our model,
so we kind of found two things that NASA announced today that are pretty exciting.
Number one, we found that there are billion year old organics trapped in the rocks.
And this is substantial.
They're finding more and more organics than they thought.
Possibilities are this is methane, this is, just all sorts of stuff that could lead to
life and at least shows the signs that there may potentially be life on Mars or have been
life on Mars.
Tim Dodd: And the other thing is we've found repeatable measurements of methane in the
atmosphere.
Previously, Mars rovers and orbiters have seen plumes of random bits of methane, but
we really ... they were just sudden spikes and we didn't know how to explain it.
And it wasn't repeatable.
That's the big, scary thing.
It's just like, "Oh, there's some methane.
Alright."
There wasn't really a good system for understanding.
Well, now we know that they actually can see it change by the season by a factor of three
times.
There's peaks and valleys of the background methane.
Tim Dodd: And this is great for our model of Mars.
Now that we understand that, we can input more data and hopefully, figure out more and
more about what makes Mars tick.
And this is fantastic for the upcoming Mars 2020 rover, which will have a lot ... a bigger
suite of potential to find life on Mars, that's even more honed in to searching for this stuff
than even Curiosity was.
Don't forget, we do have another Mars lander, the Insight lander, but that's really to study
the geology.
It's not really searching for life on Mars.
Even though that's headed to Mars right now and will land relatively soon, it's not there
to actually find life.
Tim Dodd: But Mars 2020 rover, which as you may guess by the name, is hopefully going
to land on Mars in 2020 and it's well ... it's on it's way.
It's basically a brother/sister to Curiosity.
It's based on the same platform.
We'll just have a different suite of instruments.
That will be great, because now they have even more of baseline of how to study and
what to study.
This is great.
The Curiosity Mars rover made four samplings into the Gale Crater, where it's currently
at and then it heats up that rock to 500 degrees celsius or 900 fahrenheit and it studies them.
That's how it's been able to ... it's been doing this basically since day one using it's
SAM instrument, which is the Sample Analysis of Mars.
Tim Dodd: And it's been doing this, but now we finally are just putting a lot of pieces
together.
That's what this is all about.
I know it probably sounds pretty mundane at this point to some of us that aren't totally
tuned into this stuff, like the experts at NASA and JPL, but at the same time, anything
that expands our model and continues our actual ... We might actually think we're onto something
here.
And that's huge.
And again, there's a reason why we're sending more and more rovers and probes to further
study Mars.
And this is just exciting news for those upcoming missions.
Tim Dodd: I'm really excited.
This is just more proof.
And the craziest thing is we aren't even entirely sure still what we've found.
And that's always exciting as scientists.
That they can continue to really dive into there and figure it out.
Fingers crossed.
This is great news.
This is exciting that we're on the right track.
Every time we discover something like this it just actually furthers and motivates us
to keep exploring.
And that's what this is all about.
Congrats.
Hats off to NASA and the team at JPL.
You guys are doing fantastic work.
Please keep it up.
Tim Dodd: Make sure and follow along.
I'll let you guys know if there's anything else that's coming out in the near future.
But that's pretty exciting news for now.
I'll have a lot of upcoming videos about stuff like this and lots of other things.
If you want to follow along, make sure you subscribe here.
I do a lot of this kind of stuff and livestream launches and things like that.
Be sure and subscribe.
Let me know if you guys have any other questions about Curiosity or Mars or rockets or space
flight in general.
That's going to do it for me.
Just a quick little update because I'm excited.
I hope you guys are excited.
This is a big, ... just another step of we're on the right track.
Again, congratulations to the team at NASA and JPL.
Keep up the great work.
We'll all be cheering for you over here.
But, that's going to do it for me.
I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, bringing space down to earth for everyday people.