(17) Sat 6 Dec 97 16:15 By: Jack Sargeant To: ALL Re: UFO UPDATES St: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ @EID:1c9a 238681e0 @MSGID: 1:379/12@fidonet aa1015b8 @PID: FM+ 2.12.SW F2JL3BqP87 =========================================================================== BBS: The Matrix BBS Date: 12-06-97 (15:54) Number: 195 From: JACK SARGEANT Refer#: NONE To: ALL Recvd: NO Subj: UFO UPDATES Conf: (195) UFO --------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stig_Agermose@online.pol.dk (Stig Agermose) To: updates@globalserve.net Date: Sat, 6 Dec 1997 14:07:02 +0200 Subject: New Mexico Scientists Seek Life In Martian Meteorite >From the Albuquerque Journal's site. URL: http://www.abqjournal.com/scitech/1sci12-01.htm Monday, December 1, 1997 =20 UNM Scientists Seek Life in Rock The Institute of Meteoritics is studying a piece of the Martian meteorite that some think contains evidence of ancient life on the Red Planet By John Fleck Journal Staff Writer The dark spot on Chip Shearer's microscope slide, no wider than a human hair, is tiny stuff to hold a key to one of science's biggest questions: Was there once life on Mars?=20 The spot is a bit of carbon lodged in a crack in a rock. =20 Sliced thin to fit on a microscope slide and magnified by a high-tech electron microscope, the rock's fractured minerals look like ice on a Minnesota lake breaking up in the spring thaw.=20 The rock is a meteorite from Mars, and some scientists believe the carbon is evidence there was once life on that distant planet. Shearer and his University of New Mexico colleagues are working to see if that theory is right.=20 An electron microscope in a University of New Mexico basement magnifies Shearer's spot of carbon into a dark, narrow sinew edged in white, and Shearer huddles before a computer terminal, studying the image.=20 The sinew is made of carbonates, molecules a team of NASA scientists says were created by tiny bacteria that once lived in the rock.=20 Their controversial claim was made in the summer of 1996, setting off a fierce scientific debate.=20 Now, the space agency has turned to Shearer and a handful of other scientists around the country to try to help settle the question of whether the life on Mars claim is right.=20 Shearer and Adrian Brearley, both of UNM's Institute of Meteoritics, are two of 14 scientists whose proposals to study the Martian meteorite won funding earlier this year from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.=20 Along with money, Shearer and Brearley received precious pieces of the rock itself.=20 Shearer is poring over his microscopic images of the little carbonate globs and the glassy minerals around them, trying to understand how they were formed.=20 Were the conditions conducive to life, or was it so hot inside the rock when the carbonates were formed that nothing could have survived?=20 Scientists found the rock on an Antarctic ice field in 1984. By studying its chemistry, they determined it came from Mars, apparently knocked off that planet by a great collision 16 million years ago and sent into an orbit that eventually crossed Earth's path. =20 Shearer's piece is not much bigger in diameter than a pencil. It has been preserved in a microscope slide, and Shearer has placed it in a small chamber that looks like a microwave oven with a chimney.=20 The chimney pumps a stream of electrons onto the sample, and detectors pick up the electrons and X-rays that bounce back, giving Shearer a crystal-clear picture of the rock and its chemical makeup.=20 If it was too hot for bacteria to have survived when the carbonates were formed, scientists say you can rule out the life-on-Mars explanation.=20 Since what has come to be known as NASA's "life announcement," critics have offered up evidence that the rock's minerals could only have formed at such high temperatures.=20 But the question is unsettled, said University of Tennessee meteorite expert Harry McSween, an advocate for the hot-rock view.=20 A "just right" temperature, like Goldilocks' porridge, doesn't prove the life on Mars case, but at least it means life was possible, according to McSween.=20 "It allows the argument to continue," McSween said.=20 Scientists have determined that the rock itself formed 4.5 billion years ago on the surface of Mars, just as the planet was forming.=20 "It's part of the old Martian crust," Shearer said.=20 Since it formed, the rock has been battered one or more times by meteors or other space debris slamming into Mars, cracking and heating the rock and, in the process, creating the minerals found in the rock's cracks that Shearer is looking at.=20 Shearer was actually studying pieces of this same meteorite before "the life announcement," and his analysis of the rock's chemistry has made him one of the leading skeptics of the life on Mars claim.=20 But it's one of the ironies of science that, despite that belief, his new work seems to support the claims of the life on Mars camp.=20 Ed Scott of the University of Hawaii reported evidence earlier this year that glassy minerals found in the rock's cracks could only have formed at high temperatures, suggesting the carbonates formed at temperatures too high for life.=20 Shearer's work suggests Scott is wrong, that the minerals and the carbonates formed at different times, meaning the door is left open for the life on Mars crowd.=20 While that might be seen to conflict with Shearer's anti-life beliefs, that's science, Shearer said -- following the evidence where it leads him. "I just want to reconstruct the history and get out the answer," he explained.=20 Even though his work supports a life-like temperature for the carbonates' formation, that doesn't mean it proves there was life on Mars. Shearer believes the carbonates could have been formed by ordinary chemical reactions, with no bacteria involved.=20 Ultimately, Shearer said, he would be happy to be proven wrong on the question of life in this meteorite.=20 "I'd be very happy if someone confirmed the record of life was preserved" in the meteorite, Shearer said. "I just don't see it."=20 =20 Copyright =A9 1997 Albuquerque Journal * SLMR 2.1a * He was the last of mankind. There was a knock on the door --- FMail 1.22 * Origin: -=Keep Watching the Skies=- ufo1@juno.com (1:379/12) SEEN-BY: 12/12 218/890 1001 270/101 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 3804/180 @PATH: 379/12 33 12/12 396/1 3615/50 218/1001