Storm silences Mars rover

‘Opportunity’ not responding

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla, June 13, (Agencies): A NASA rover on Mars has fallen silent as a gigantic dust storm envelops the planet and blots out the sun.

Flight controllers tried late Tuesday night to contact Opportunity, but the rover did not respond. The storm has been growing since the end of May and now covers one-quarter of the planet.

Controllers expect it will be several more days before there’s enough sunlight to recharge Opportunity’s battery through its solar panels. NASA says the battery is likely so low that only a clock is still working, to wake the spacecraft for periodic power-level checks.

NASA launched the twin rovers Opportunity and Spirit in 2003 to study Martian rocks and soil. Spirit hasn’t worked for several years. Opportunity, however, has kept exploring well past its expected mission lifetime.

Earlier, in a breakthrough for the hunt for life on Mars, a NASA robot has detected the most complex organic matter yet from 3.5 billionyear-old rocks on the surface of the Red Planet, scientists have said.

The unmanned Curiosity rover has also found increasing evidence for seasonal variations of methane on Mars, indicating the source of the gas is likely the planet itself, or possibly its subsurface water.

While not direct evidence of life, the compounds drilled from Mars’ Gale Crater are the most diverse array ever drilled from the surface of the planet since the robotic vehicle landed in 2012, experts say.

“This is a significant breakthrough because it means there are organic materials preserved in some of the harshest environments on Mars,” said lead author of one of two studies in Science, Jennifer Eigenbrode, an astrobiologist at NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center.

“And maybe we can find something better preserved than that has signatures of life in it,” she told AFP.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has previously found organic matter. A smaller discovery was announced in 2014.

The Antiquities Ministry said Wednesday the discovery in the Wadi Umm Tineidba, by an Egyptian- American mission from Yale University, includes at least three concentrations of rock art.

Mission chief John Coleman Darnielen

“This is the first really trusted detection,” co-author Sanjeev Gupta, a professor of Earth science at Imperial College London, told AFP.

“What this new study is showing in some detail is the discovery of complex and diverse organic compounds in the sediments. That doesn’t mean life, but organic compounds are the building blocks of life,” he added.

“This is the first time we have detected such a diverse array of these sorts of things.”

The compounds might have come from a meteorite, or from geological formations akin to coal and black shale on Earth, or some form of life, Eigenbrode said.

Their precise source is still a mystery.

“We have detected the bits and pieces of something bigger,” said Eigenbrode.

The samples were drilled from the base of Mount Sharp, inside a basin called Gale Crater that is believed to have held an ancient Martian lake.

“That is a good place for life to have lived if it ever existed on Mars,” she said.

The mudstone rock was drilled from the top five centimeters (two inches) of the Martian surface and heated in a miniature analysis lab located on board the rover.

A French-built instrument revealed “several organic molecules and volatiles reminiscent of organic-rich sedimentary rock found on Earth, including: thiophene, 2- and 3-methylthiophenes, methanethiol, and dimethylsulfide,” said the Science report.

The other paper in Science reported on new details in the search for the source of methane on Mars, which has wide spikes and dips according to the seasons.

Methane, the simplest organic molecule, ranges “between 0.24 to 0.65 parts per billion, peaking near the end of summer in the Northern hemisphere,” said the report, based on three years of data.

The gas may be stored in the cold Martian subsurface in water-based crystals called clathrates, researchers said.

says the discovery provides evidence for the continuity and interaction of artistic styles of the Eastern Desert and Nile Valley.

Egypt hopes such discoveries will encourage tourism as it struggles to revive