Weep No Tears for the Abandoned Mars Soil Samples

 I disagree with many of the decisions and statements coming these days from the White House. But there was announced recently a decision I approve of.  The Trump administration has recommended reduction of the budget of NASA, which will apparently lead to cancellation of the Mars Sample Return mission. We read this in a recent government document: "In line with the Administration’s objectives of returning to the Moon before China and putting a man on Mars, the Budget would reduce lower priority research and terminate unaffordable missions such as the Mars Sample Return mission that is grossly overbudget and whose goals would be achieved by human missions to Mars."  Estimated to cost some 11 billion dollars, the Mars Sample Return mission is a boondoggle that should not be funded, mainly because of the failure to ever find amino acids on Mars. 

In my February 2021 post "The Poor Design of the Latest Mars Mission," written just after the Perseverance rover landed on Mars, I said that because of the poor design of the Perseverance mission, "you will not be hearing any 'NASA discovered life on Mars' announcement anytime in the next few years."  So far that prediction has held up. A NASA page said that the "Perseverance Rover will search for signs of ancient microbial life." But no such signs have been found. 

The Mars mission I referred to was a weird hodgepodge. It landed a rover on Mars, and also a little helicopter device. A key part of the mission was the strange idea of digging up soil samples, putting them into tubes, and just dumping the tubes where the soil was retrieved, in hopes that a later mission would retrieve the samples.  I lampooned the idea in my visual below:

The idea was that a later automated mission might  land on Mars, go to where these soil samples had been dumped, grab them, and somehow bring them back to Earth. From a design standpoint, this never made any sense. Why not have any new mission (manned or unmanned)  dig up its own soil samples, rather than going to all the trouble of trying to find soil samples that had been dug up by a previous mission, and left in various remote locations on Mars? 

Over its lifetime, as the Perseverance rover kept digging up Martian soil samples and putting them into tubes, the estimated price tag of the Mars Sample Return mission has grown ever higher, reaching 11 billion dollars.  There are two key items to be considered in judging whether it makes sense to fund it:

Issue #1: Will a manned mission land on Mars in the next 25 years?  

It makes little sense to spend 11 billion dollars to retrieve soil samples from Mars if a manned mission is going to Mars at any time in the next 25 years. It is estimated that if the Mars Sample Return mission was funded, it would be at least five years before it could retrieve samples from Mars, meaning the samples would not be returned before the year 2030. But many think that humans will land on Mars by perhaps the year 2040 or 2045. Any manned mission to Mars could include a lab capable of full analysis relevant to biology.  It makes no sense to spend 11 billion dollars to bring Mars soil samples to an earthly human-directed lab capable of full analysis, if you are going to send to Mars (by means of a manned mission to Mars) exactly the same  human-directed lab capable of full analysis 10 or 15 years later.  There is no time urgency involved in analyzing Mars soil, no reason why such a task cannot wait.

Issue #2: Were there any amino acids found on Mars?

The main reason to spend money analyzing soil from Mars is to look for something of biological relevance: either living organisms or traces of living organisms that existed long ago. A key issue is the probability of finding on Mars anything of biological relevance.  Very relevant to such a probability is whether amino acids have ever been found on Mars. 

Even the simplest living thing is built from very complex components: hundreds of different types of protein molecules, each a different type of complex invention. The building components of such protein molecules are amino acids. Because functional protein molecules require very special arrangements of amino acids (arrangements incredibly unlikely to occur by chance), the mere detection of amino acids does nothing to show a likelihood of life appearing. But in a place where there are no amino acids, the chance of life ever appearing is basically zero. Life originating from chance combinations of amino acids is comparable to the probability of ink splashes ever producing a 50-page technical manual.  A situation in which there are no amino acids is like hoping that ink splashes might produce a book, in some building where there isn't even any ink around. 

The fact is that amino acids have never been detected on Mars. The Perseverance rover has a sensitive SHERLOC instrument capable of detecting various types of complex chemicals. That instrument has analyzed very much Martian soil. But it never found any trace of an amino acid. 

Cells are built from organelles, which are built from protein complexes, which are built from protein molecules, which are built by making very special sequences of hundreds or thousands of amino acids, sequences that have to be just right for the protein to be functional. Life as we know it requires twenty types of amino acids, in addition to other types of equally complex components such as nucleobases. No amino acid used by living things has ever been found on Mars. This failure makes it very unlikely that Mars ever had life. To put it in baseball terms, Mars seems to have never even got a fifth of the way to first base in the process of building the simplest life. A better analogy would be to say that the chance of you getting life on Mars was like the chance of a monkey producing a well-written 40-page book, scribbling with a pen that did not even have any ink. 

The paper here discusses chemical analysis by the Mars Perseverance rover and its SHERLOC instrument mentioned in Friday's press release. We have no mention of any amino acids found. We have no mention of any biologically relevant molecules, and the biologically irrelevant organic molecules discussed are not found in any concentration greater than 20 parts per million (Earth soil, by comparison, is between 1% and 80% organic molecules). 

The 20 amino acids used by life (credit: Wikipedia commons)

So without amino acids to be found anywhere on Mars, what is the chance that soil samples retrieved from Mars would have either life or any trace of life? Basically zero. So spending 11 billion dollars on a Mars Sample Return mission would seem to be the worst kind of boondoggle and wild goose chase. 

The failure to find any amino acids on Mars is of great relevance not just to whether a Mars Sample Return mission should be launched, but also to whether a Mars manned mission should be launched. It seems that no one can credibly claim any biology rationale for a manned mission to Mars, given the failure to find amino acids on Mars. If there is any rationale for such a mission, it would have to be made without an appeal to doing important biology research. 

The cancellation of the Mars Sample Return mission is a golden opportunity for NASA to do what it has so very badly failed to do: to educate the public about the sky-high levels of organization and functional complexity in every living thing. NASA could put up a web page announcing the cancellation of the mission, and explaining why the mission is unjustified, given the failure to find any amino acids on Mars.  That would require educating people about the enormous levels of organization in all living things, something NASA never seems to do decently. There is a reason why I don't think we will see any such web page appearing. The reason is that NASA does not want to properly inform us about how bleak are the chances of ever finding any trace of life on Mars, given the failure to detect amino acids on Mars, and given the enormous organization in even the simplest living cell. NASA does not want to do that, because properly educating people about such topics will reduce the chance that the public funds a manned mission to Mars. 

A chasm chance could not have crossed on Mars

In my Google science news feed today, I see an editorial by two scientists (Bruce Jakosky and Scott Hubbard), one entitled "Mars Sample Return now!" It is an example of untrue claims and very bad reasoning by scientists. Here is some of its sophistry:

• "The results will be worth the effort and the cost, not just in understanding the world around us in general but also in determining if there has ever been life on Mars." Mars soil samples have already been well-analyzed by the SHERLOC instrument of the Perseverance Rover. Analyzing soil samples returned from Mars will not do anything to help us understand the world around us. Since amino acids have never been found on Mars, returning Mars soil samples will almost certainly not determine that life once existed on Mars. And a failure to find anything will never exclude the possibility that life once existed on Mars. 
• The authors claim that "having samples in our labs here on Earth will allow us to answer fundamental questions" about "the evolution of planets in general." The claim is untrue. 
• The authors claim that "either finding life, or looking and not finding any, would have profound implications for our society and for our understanding of the universe around us." To the contrary, not finding any evidence of life in Martian soil samples would have no implications for  our society and no implications for our understanding of the universe around us. Believers in easy abiogenesis would just keep on believing in such a thing, and might well keep on believing in life on Mars, simply thinking that these particular samples did not have life, but that life exists elsewhere on Mars. Finding life on Mars would have important philosophical implications, but because of the failure to ever detect amino acids on Mars, the chance of such a detection is negligible. 
• The authors state, "And, as we know from the Apollo experience, samples are the gift that can keep on giving, even 50 years after acquisition." Nothing of any great scientific importance was ever discovered from analyzing rocks and soil returned from the moon. 
• The authors state that "if NASA delays the return of the samples so carefully gathered by the Perseverance rover, the critical engineering and technological knowledge of how to land on Mars may be lost in the U.S. as layoffs occur." No, technological knowledge is not lost when people are laid off, partially because employees are required to document things in great detail, and organizations make sure that people write down things, rather than carrying around all their technological knowledge in their memories. 
• The authors state that by abandoning the Mars Sample Return mission (MSR), "the U.S. will be conceding the first-ever MSR to China, which has announced plans to return samples by 2031." If the Chinese are going to do their own sample return mission returning Mars soil samples by 2031, that is a strong reason for not funding NASA's proposed mission for returning Mars soil samples, as such a mission would be redundant. 
• The authors claim that "analyzing returned samples will help us dramatically in preparing for upcoming human missions." No, this is not true at all. 
• The authors claim that "returning samples in advance of human missions also allows us to reduce the risk in the human missions themselves." Once again, a claim from the authors which has no basis in fact or logic. We already know from Mars rovers what Mars soil is like. Looking for traces of extinct life in Mars soil samples will not do anything to make a manned mission safer. 

There is another reason for not doing the Mars Sample Return mission. It is the fact that anything found of biological interest is likely to be a result of earthly contamination, something coming either from an imperfect decontamination of an outgoing spacecraft, or from contamination after the return of a sample. The risk of contamination was shown by a recent news report that in the so-called "clean room" used to prepare one of NASA's Mars rovers, 26 species of contamination-resistant bacteria were discovered.