A martian rock has lots of carbon on it, and it's not clear why
摘要
美国国家航空航天局（NASA）的“毅力号”火星车在杰泽罗陨石坑探测到一块表面富含复杂大分子碳的岩石。这是迄今在火星表面发现的最浅层有机物质。在地球上，此类大分子碳通常暗示生物起源，但其确切来源尚不明确。该发现由“毅力号”搭载的SHERLOC光谱仪完成，通过紫外激光分析分子键。科学家表示，要确定该碳物质的来源，可能需要将火星样本带回地球进行进一步研究。
NASA’s Perseverance rover has spent five years traversing Jezero Crater looking for the chemical leftovers of whatever processes were at work on Mars billions of years ago. The rover has found organic carbon, but it has mostly been inside rocks that had to be drilled or abraded to expose it. But now, at an outcrop on the edge of an ancient river channel named Neretva Vallis, Perseverance detected complex macromolecular carbon sitting right on the rock’s surface.
“To our knowledge, that’s the shallowest detection of organic matter on Martian surface to date,” said Ashley E. Murphy, a researcher at the Planetary Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and lead author of the study of the rock, which was found at a site called Bright Angel. On Earth, this much macromolecular carbon usually suggests a biological origin. But to learn what this Bright Angel carbon is and where it came from, we might need to bring samples back to Earth.
Carbon on the rocks
The detection of Bright Angel carbon came from SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals), a UV Raman spectrometer fitted on Perseverance’s robotic arm. SHERLOC fires a deep-ultraviolet laser at a target and reads the light that bounces back at shifted energies, a signal that enables scientists to identify specific molecular bonds.
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