>> watch the c-span networks this weekend. >> nasa scientists yesterday announced the latest scientific discovery from the space agency's mars rover named curiosity. it landed on the red planet in 2012 as part of the laboratory mission. scientists talk about what they found and possibilities of more

discoveries. this is about an hour. >> welcome. we are live at two locations. with me i have paul who is our director of the solar system exploration division and also the principal investigator and i also have jennifer who has one of the coolest titles i know at nasa which is an astrobiologist. and here at nasa's jet propulsion laboratory in alifornia. we have christopher and. my name is michelle. i am an astronomer here at nasa and one of the things i was at the vet today is that none of us live in a vacuum we all have our own

social media accounts and are aware of the interest that this has generated. will tell your now we are not announcing today is the detection of life. we cannot talk about that but what we are talking about our exciting new results that have to do with organic molecules. we understand organic molecules are the building blocks of life and if we don't announce the detection of life the discoveries we talk about are important next step in finding out whether mars was once habitable or still might be habitable. so what i'm going to do it now is lead it off with paul who will talk with us about what we know and don't know about mars. paul, straight up, what have we found? >> really exciting times. i will reinforce what you say. life, organic compounds on earth just so much bear the imprint of life that is natural for us to equate organic molecules with finding life on mars but that's not the bottom line of trying to get out here. the bottom line is we greatly xpanded our search for organic compounds which are fundamental

to our search for life and it's interesting because of two complementary results which is organic from billion-year-old rocks that got trapped in a giant lake and billions of years ago and the second is the simplest organic methane in the atmosphere and those two results and chris who is lead author on these papers will talk about. let me add a little bit of the context. it was kind of august, 2012, more than five years ago we came barreling into mars and there was the exciting seven minutes of tear. with the great engineering team that got us there and the objective of the mission was to explore a inhabitable environment on mars and we found clays that were formed by water and curiosity that is measures the elemental -- that measures the elemental

compounds of the rock and what we've always done and what we ill talk about sam, we essentially found out very early that this was a habitable environment. water had been there for a long, long time. with our sam experiment we saw some interesting things. for example, how old the rocks were, how long they had been part of the cosmic and how the atmosphere had escaped over billions of years. we kept going on this search for organic. we found organic molecules before we expanded the search for what we found. it's really exciting. michelle: so paul just entioned some of the results nd you can talk to us. f you are on social media go

to #asknasa. we will be taking questions live from the media later in the show. you join us on facebook but your question in the facebook comments and will get to as many as we possibly can. will take questions lie from the media later in the show. now we'll go to jen. jennifer, tell us about the significance of finding organic life and mars. we found it in an agent like bread in those could have come >> from life. we don't know that there was life on mars and the organic molecules we found are not specifically evidence of life because there are other sources of making those molecules including things that are non- biological in nature, things like meteorites or even rock processes. we can attribute geology all by itself to life without making organic molecules. the information we have doesn't tell us which source is responsible for what we have. michelle: well, thank you.

another one of the major detections and discoveries to -- that we are talking about today involves methane on mars. we think of it as a simple gas and we will talk to chris webster and chris is instrumental in the discovery before the methane spikes, the level went up dramatically on mars. can you tell us about what today is different and noteworthy about mars? chris: well, michelle, as you know, every chapter in the story of the methane on mars has been a surprise. from sometime ago the report of plumes in the atmosphere of methane. there were reports of patches when orbiters looked in spikes as you just mentioned. every one of them a surprise and frustrating because none of them repeatable in time or space and they seem to show that methane was misbehaving and it was sporadic or almost random pulses and patches were

showing up. today we are announcing the discovery of a repeatable, identifiable, seasonal pattern in the methane measurement and we can look at the graphic and see that in the lower background level because most of the time were not looking at spikes and we see the low background level and you can see from the growth, and the big surprise is not only do we have this wonderful repeatability but the seasonal cycle changes by a factor of three. that's a huge change. completely unexpected and what it does is gives us a key to unlocking the mysteries associated with mars methane because now we have something to test our models and our understanding against. we will hear more about that later. michelle: so one of the things you hear about is organic. and a lot of people are familiar with the different ways so i will talk

to jennifer. tell us a bit about what we mean by organic and tell us what is the significant about finding this on mars? jen: so organic molecules to a chemist is simply carbon and hydrogen. sometimes you have so far and nitrogen oxygen but it's just that structure so what were not talking about is molecules that specifically come from life and we're really not referring to the stuff you find at the grocery store which is that pesticide-free produce that we get. they are very different things. . michelle: this is one of the engineering feats, we're finding molecules, we have a chemical laboratory on another planet. can you tell us how we identify these molecules on another planet, on mars? jen: the curiosity drills into rock layers, that rock powder gets put into an oven and heated, the gases from that get

whipped into a gas speck tromter. they enter into this chamber where electrons inon-- ionize that material. you have molecules split into different pieces. it can then identify what those different pieces are and put them back together to understand what the original molecule was. now there's another feature at is it has a gas chromatograph, which looks like this. it's a long tube and it has a hole in it about the width of a human hair. the column allows -- allows molecules to go through it and go down this long, long tube. when they come out the other side they come out one by one. they're separated. when that happen, they go into the mass speck tromter and we can see individual molecules. by our was built french colleagues and it's because of the g.c.'s we were

table identify certain molecules we are reporting on today. michelle: and we have one of our first questions from social media. you talk about drilling into the surface of mar, how far -- how deep do you go snsm jen: about five cent meters. that's as far as we can go. michelle: we'll talk about that later and what might be farther down. i remember the landing of the curiosity rover as one of the best nights, early morningings of my life. en you showed me that tiny as crow mat graph -- gas chormatograph coil that had to land on mars. we're going to go to our friend at j.p.l. tell us where you are and tell us about the curiosity rohr, the larger rover. >> hi, there. yeah, you're probably wondering what's behind me. what you see behind me is the test moddle of the curiosity

model a twin basically that we use for testing here on earth. the one on mars is in a place alled gail crater. it formed a crater. it wasn't there when the crater formed. it formed as sediment was carried in by rivers and streams and deposited into a giant lake that nilled crater. as that sediment settled out it builds up this elayers that build up the mountain. each layer of the mountain is younger than the one below it. by climbing the mountain with the reer we can read the ancient history of mars. climbing is what we've been doing. we're now 1,000 feet above the crater floor, as high as some of the sky scheepers from downtown los angeles and we get this amazing view. the progress has been to drill

each lay ore they have mown tape them samples jen describes were taken from the lowest part of the mountain about two years ago in 2015. it's taken us a few years to get an using of the results so we can describe them to you today. michelle: there was a reason the crater was selected, there was something fascinating and the evidence of water. can you tell us why the site was selected? ashwin: we had some hints water with was involved because of the orbiters that have been at mars before us. there's the mars reconnaissance orbiter, mars express. both of those orbiters had instruments capable of detecting clay minerals at the site. we know some of the layers in the mountain are made of clay minerals, which mean water interacted with them. we weren't sure if wivers and lakes existed and curiosity has shown that lakes exist forward look time, probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. michelle: i have a question from social media.

john pass tell said tell us about the repairs made to the arm, there was prubble with the drilling arm, space is hard, you're on mars, how did you fix this from millions of miles away? ashwin: this is worth a press conference of its own. it's coincidence we have this amazing week to tell you about the zhofse drill but also the results from the last few years' of exploration as well. in late 2016 we realized one they have main motors of the drill was not function regular liablely and that meant the drill was dead, and a big part of what we were doing, we'd no longer be able to do. we had to invent a new way of drill, i have to give credit to the engineers who did that work. for a year and a half they tried to fix the motor, then invented a new way of drilling that didn't use that motor any longer and just this week we have achieved success, we have

drilled and analyzed samples once again. michelle: talking about drilling down and analyzing the samples, and for those fans of organic chemistry, we're going to dive into the details now. jen, tell me about what was detected? jen: we have discovered many molecules, including benzene, and some carbon chains, like propane. these are representative of molecule, small little bits and pieces of molecules. but because we see these coming off the sample at high temperatures, what they're telling us is they're part of something larger, a macromolecule. this is an example of something we call on -- we find on earth cker; ogen and we find this in coal and back shale and in meteorites. they're common. this tells us there's organic

material in the rock in a different form than what sam detected and what it means is it was in a robust form this orm of organic matter is resist ant to change. e other thing we found was thyoscene. we can tell after the molecules go through the actual structure. we use this information to figure out this type of structure. so here we have four carbons and a sulfur. sulfur looks like this in rock orm. but in the sample the sulfur is probably in the organic molecules themselves and that's important because sulfur is material that can help bind all the small piece of organic molecules together into something big like the large molecule i showed you. sulfur helps resist oxidation. that's really important for our

skfry because we are looking at ancient rocks that are 3.5 billion years old and we found organic materials inside them. however we drilled in the top five cent meters. in that top five cent meters, the surface is exposed to a lot of ionizing radiation and that generates free radicals and ox daunts and all of those can degrade organic material. so that rock has been sitting at the surface for an extended period of time, tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. and that's a long time for all these changes to happen. there were a lot of people thought we weren't going to organic molecules we did. for instance, viking started this quest back in 1976 looking for organic molecules. we -- curiosity has continued that quest and now we have a diverse set of molecules we can now start to understand a little bit more about how this material is preserved and where else we might look to get more.

>> this is an amazing thing. working on mars is hard. a lot of people know mars has almost no atmosphere -- michelle: this is an amazing thing. working on mars is hard. a lot of people know mars has almost no atmosphere. it's not proteched like earth is. so we have this lab rah tir working on mars. the radiation from the sun gets about how far down into the soil? jen: it's coming from euh sun but also the galaxy and it can extend about a meter and a half down, maybe a little more, dends on what model you use. but there are places that you can go deeper down we might be able to tap into molecules that aren't disrupted by the radiation itself. and the mars rover is an example it's going to drill two meters deep. this is the european space agency's mars rover, it will have an opportunity to examine materials at the surface and on the way down to see if there's comparisons. we'll learn how important it is to -- where we have to refine

ourage cease. where we'll understand the preservation issue and how it affects things at the surface compared to things further down. but most importantly, if there are biosignatures inside that organic material or associated with it, we're going to have a better chance of understanding that if we get the materials that are not exposed to all the radiation. michelle: we're finding some interesting chemistry on the surface of mars. and it's a promise of more interesting chemistry to come that we can get deeper down underneath that. looking at gail crater, how did these organics get here? you're finding the organic molecules on the crater, how did they get here? jen: what we're looking at is layers put down in an ancient lake that lake had been there for a long period of time, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of years, we're not sure. but there's lake sediment from a gigantic lake. organic material can come into

the lake through rivers, they can be windblown in or they can be formed in the actual lake itself by things like biology. now there's three different sources of organic material too. one of them is biology. one of them could be meteorites that are falling into the surface and being directly deposit and the other is a rock forming process that might generate organic material on their own and they might be the ones that are being brought in by rivers. we don't have enough information from the observations we've made to tell what the source is and how it got in there. michelle: we found a good will case to look for organics on mars and we're going to talk about the seasonal methane. are your discoveries all related to chris' stuff about the methane? jen: yes and no. if you take the organic detection in the ancient rock and generalize it, we have found organic material in the subsurface. that might be representative of

organic material throughout a grander area. that is carbon that could go through various processes and make its way to the surface and form, turn into things like methane and seep into the atmosphere. now the detection that chris will talk about is modern day methane as opposed to ancient discovered in the rocks. michelle: now we go to chris webster at j.p.l. so chris, tell me a bit about the seasonality of methane and some detail about the new discovery. chris: i thought i'd tell you right away that we've seen the seasonal variations and we've tried to look at the data and come up with some explanations and we've been table rule out some of the sources. we don't actually think the delivery of interplanetary dust that can produce methane in the atmosphere, we don't think that's so important because we wouldn't expect to see a large

seasonal variation. we might see 20%. instead we're seeing this massive change in the methane signal. so what we consider, we look at the data and the idea that best fits our data is the idea of subsurface storage. way under the ground, under mars, there's methane that's trapped, it may be trapped with other material, we don't know if that methane is ancient we feel don't know if it's modern, it could be either. but we also don't know if it as created from rock, or if it was created by mike robes. we cannot distinguish that. so -- but the methane leaks or seeps up to the surface, we believe, and finds its way through cracks and fiss yours. eventually when it gets to the surface, we're in a situation where the surface temperature can modulate or amplify the release of methane. this is an exciting time

because we have this seasonal psychle to condition strain some of the theories and the sources that's important. michelle: i want to talk to you about trying to distinguish between biological or nonbiological methane. but to begin with, tell us how you detected this. in jen's work they brought martian stoil into an oven and heated it up. how was yours detected? >> we're ingesting from the air. if you look at curiosity, about waist height there are two valves that allow the martian atmosphere into our sample cell. once it gets into sam and the speck tromter in particular we have tie hi little infrared laser beams that bounces 81 times between these mirrors and that amplifies the sensitive so when you look at the laser lights on the detector you can scan the laser and look for the

spectrum of methane. and the resolution, spectral resolution is so high that we see individual methane lines and in particular we see a fingerprint of three lines together that can only be for methane. a measurement is unambiguous. the signals we see come from methane and nothing else. and secondly we measure them with higher precision. michelle: let's go to two different signals. bacteria under the surface of mars would be more active in the summer. is that the idea? chris: that's a possible idea. again we cannot distinguish pentonization, the reaction of water to produce hydrogen. once you get the hydrogen released in that reaction it to produce ized

methane, the iabiological route or through enzymes in the mike robe in the cell. michelle: so in simpler terms, if you have water that's interacting with volcanic minerals you can get similar methane trapped in the soil and preferentially comes up in the sum her chris: yes. michelle: right. chris: we're hoping that we'll see more -- we'll get more results in the future on this, pecially from other missions and as far as the biological source or not, there are several other steps to be made. we can look at the carbon-13 isotope ratio that could be suggestive of biological activity and look they accompaniment of other gases. we can assist on the surface in curiosity and maybe one day we'll see a plume that's large enough where we can measure

that carbon-13 ratio ourselves. there's lots of exciting ways forward but at this moment, again, the biological option is being held. hasn't bven ruled out. michelle: i want to take a moment to say for anyone joining us, we're live at nasa at the goddard space flight center and nasa's jet propulsion lab rah toir. we're taking your questions on social media, use the hash tag, #asknasa. we talked about the results from the mars curiosity rover. one thing i want to mention is we have a mission omars on the way right now. this year we launched the insight mission that will arrive at mars november 26 of this coming year. the exciting thing about the insight mission is it's a different definition of the

word light it's looking to see what the planet, mars is geologically alive, so are there marsquakes? is the interior of mars producing heat? coming this fall we'll have another landing on mars, a geological mission to understand what the activity is geologically. i want to make one more trip back to the mars curiosity rover and ashwin. the amazing thing about the seasonal variation of methane is you need to be there for many seasons. so tell us about the lifetime of the curiosity rover and give us a sense of what an amazing accomplishment it's been. ashwin: this is wonderful to have the discovery that took so many years to not only take the measurements but to analyze as well. the measurements that chris described come from an instrument called the tuneable laser speck tromter and we have tromoter and - spec

we have taken about 30 measurements. without having the rover years, three ee times longer than its original mission, we wnt have discovered this. i want to add a few more words to jen's discovery. one of the things that makes that so special is how it fulfills the role curiosity has played within the mars exploration program. nasa charged this mission with detecting organics on mars and we've done that and expanded the range of organics we know of today. it was more than that too we wanted to understand how organic molecules, organic matter on mars, that was incorporated in rocks three billion years ago, would be there for us to survive or will it be there for us to discover all these years later.

what are the processes and environments that allowed it to resist that degradation. and that really is remarkable from jen's area, to be able to determine what types of molecules and what types of environment allowed those molecules to persist to today. this is not only important for curiosity, fulfilling one of our main mission objectives but also for future mars missions who will seek direct signs of life. missions like xo mars and mars 2020. it gives us confidence that when those missions get to mars, there still could be something for them to discover. michelle: you were just mentioning that the martian year is longer than the earth year. another thing is that the martian day, tell us about how similar the martian day is to an earth day and how different it is and i think you have personal stories relating to this. ashwin: there's an enormous number of similarities between mars and earth, they are similar planets, in some ways

that are coincidental. mars has a 24 1/2 hour day, it has a tilt on the ax sit of 25 degrees, similar to earth's tilt of 23 degrees, making the and seasons s -- ery similar -- very similar. on that day for the first few months. michelle: tell us about where you are right now. ashwin: year at the jet propulsion laboratory, the mars yard, which doesn't look like a yard because we're in a shed. you see the engineering model, maggie, she's very much like the one on mars. especially in terms of all the software on board, all the electronics, we have some of

the instruments here as well. and this model can drive out into the yard and we've used it for tests including solving anomalies that occur on the surface of mars. s the model that was used to teach the rover on mars how to drive and how to navigate. we can use it for a lot of things when we don't want to use the precious time and resources of the actual rover on mars. michelle: we'll start by taking some questions now but first i want to go back to paul for one more last thing. we talked about landing this incredible rover on mars and you have that kem ka laboratory, tell me how you got that laboratory on mors. paul: you're asking a lot of questions and let me have you ask me something nobody would think to ask. what did i do this morning. michelle: what did you do this morning paul? the president: like ashwin

mentioned, we're just in the process of getting the drill back in order so the search for organics is going on. getting back to your other question which is what it took to get the laboratory, the instruments are complicated. it took a huge team of scientists and engineers an software programmers, it's an international team. we put this instrument together at nasa-goddard. chris webster's team at jet ropulsion labs did the spectrometer. this morning they were calling in because they were supporting operations of our instruments from tuluth. we spent several years putting this together, testing it at goddard, put in it environmental chambers to match the conditions we'd have on the surface of mars. tested out the scripts, the software we were going to run

on mars and then we brought toyota jet propulsion labs and this image you see shows sam, that's the gold-coated box about the size of a microwaven of being gently lowered into the rover. the rover is upside down at that point. we lowered sam into it and then did some more test, put the whole rover in a big environmental chamber at j.p.l. when we were sure everything was perfect, then the rohr was ready to ship to the cape and everything got launch. you see everyone in bunny suits. the reason they're in the white suit, we did not want to bring our skin oils and everything else to mars because then jen would have to report that we were finding things that look like they came from chris we are steb or someone else in the clean room at -- chris webster or someone else in the clean room at j.p.l. it's been great work, several nations joining us, it's been exciting. michelle: what you're talk out leads to a question from

social media. they you guarantee haven't been compromised? paul wemplet run blanks, if we're looking to make sure none they have residuals are producing what we see, we do a full sequence of runs and don't put sample in the cup. we work very have hard to make sure what we're seing is from mars and we're very confident that what we're seeing is from mars. michelle: there's a lot of questions coming in right now. as i mentioned, you're welcome to give us any questions you have. u can suze use the hash tag, #asknasa, or on facebook, put your question in the comments. there are questions about methane that we're detecting, can it be used as a fuel for future missions? is it useful for human presence on mars? should we go to chris for that?

or do you want to take a stab at that? chris: right now we're seeing low background levels. of course methane is always useful as a fuel. but the ability to ex-trabblingt it from the atmosphere would not be efficient. but if there's a way one could access subsurface reservoirs it becomes a whole new ballgame. that's speculation at this point. michelle: and for ashwin, if there was one more tool you could add to the rover, what would it have been? so one thing you'd like to have . ashwin: i'm going to deflect and say the next thing we want to do on mars is what we're doing with with the mars 2020 mission, building on the results from has been tabblet

and organics and the possibility of life curiosity as opened up and looking ahead to having instruments on mars built to look for signs of life. michelle: jen, this sounds like a good one for an astrobiologist. we have organic molecule, how do you know there's life? what do you look for that would hint that it's based on life? jen: all life we know of is based on organic million kuhls even though we know that's not the only way to make them. so we look for signatures associated with organic material. that was part of the reason why it was so significant we found organic materials in the first place. it helps us guide where we're going to look for more. in those signatures, they might be things about the chemistry of the organic material or perhaps there are things about how the organic materials are stuck together in shape, how they're packaged, maybe their isotopes. there's a whole suite of

chemical and physical things we can measure that would indicate signatures of life. aul: let me jump in there. it went to one of the most northern springs and then we put some of this material in he gas chromatagraphspectrometer and it showed signs of life. that's one thing we'd look for. jen: and there's another experiment on sam we haven't used yet a wet chemistry experiment. if those types of things are left behind in the organic material we come across, perhaps if it's the right sample and right compounds are there, maybe we'll get some hints. mip i understand we have a media question -- michelle: i understand we have a media question they're going to try to feed in on audio. if i could ask that question? >> from chris van cleave from cbs, your line is open.

>> thank you. if this has been talked about. in terms a layman would understand, why is methane so exciting and what is so intriguing about this organic chemical or compound that's different than what we kind of already knew that there were building blocks of life on mars? michelle: should we go to chris for the methane question? did you hear that? chris: yes, i would start right away by saying whenever you have an oxidizing at motts fear and see reduced compounds like methane or hydrogen sullfide they're exciting and in particular for the mars methane because 95% of the methane on earth is produced from biologist, it's produced in termites or rice paddies or cows or sheep or termites, etc., because of that, there's always been an interest in mars

methane, its potential biological origin. that's true also because we know it only can last for 300 years. so if we see methane in the martian at moss tier that means it has -- something is happening today. it's being released or it's being created. i'll hand over to paul to answer the second part. paul: let me answer that, on earth, like chris mentioned, most of the methane in the at moss tier comes from biology, rice paddies or from a lot of different processes. but all -- most of the oxygen on earth also comes from biology. they ns of years ago, started cranking away. in our atmosphere we have a combination of methane and oxygen. that's what some of the folks ilding these big telescopes, telescopes to the james webb for example, they're going to

be looking for come by nations of oxidizing and reduce things that might be evidence of life. so it's really fundamental, it's interesting. i sure hope you understood that. michelle: i understand we have another question from the media over audio. >> nancy atkinson, your line is open. >> hi. there was a similar announcement of detection of both methane and organic materials tpwhack 2014 also by the curiosity rover. how is this announcement different or how have you built on the find frgs 2014 for this detection? michelle: we were just talking about beforehand. jen, do you want to take that? jen: sure , in 2014 we reported the discovery of chlorinated molecule, carbon structures that have chlorine attach.

it was a significant discovery, the first time we were able to confirm organic molecules on mars. they was first time. we had been looking for this for a very long time with the hope we would find it with the vikings instruments in 1976 and finally with curiosity in landing on a lake bed that we could actually discover these. now what we're left with, what do these men? the thing about chlorinated molecules, it's not what you typically find in natural samples. so we weren't sure what the significance was at the time. however, it did give us a lot of motivation to keep looking. there have to be other layers in the crater, other lays of the lake sediment. we wanted to find more orbeganic molecules. that's exactly what happened. we drove four miles away, we started down at the hest part of the crater, drove four miles away, got to the base of the mountain and the first layer that we looked at contain all of this organic material we're reporting today. so we have essentially expanded upon the inventory of the

organic molecules and now we have a better sense of how they were preserved in the red sox n the first place. paul: should mention, your report showed significantly greater abundance than we'd seen before. one more thing to add, in almost every experiment we do, as we heat up the sample in a quartz cup we see a big oxygen signal and that comes from a mineral that breaks apart that contains chlorine and oxygen. oxygen can react with some of the organics and produce carbon dioxide, that's called combustion. what yen did with part of her analysis was to look at the high temperature release of organics that might have escaped some of that destruction. there's still things there we're not seeing. that's motivating our desire to get back and with different techniques really look for a more comprehensive sweet of -- suite of orgainics and figure out where they came in. michelle: chris, would you like

to give an answer as to why what we're announcing today is different than before as far as the seasonality of the methane? chris: it's very different. in the past we were seeing spikes that well we couldn't understand and we had ideas about them but we couldn't constrain them because they only occurred occasionally. now, first of all, we measured the background level over two years so we know the total amount of methane in the atmosphere is constrained by that. it's a low average value of only .4 parts per billion. it changes a lot but the total amount is low so that also constrains the magnitude of pulses and spikes elsewhere that would mix into the atmosphere. this is a very important observation. the fact that it changes so dramatically, the factor of three, has got to be duplicated by models that explain it. we do think that the spikes and the low background seasonal cycle are related. quite conceivable that the same

are slowly seeping methane up to the surface are also occasionally causing large pullingses of the gas to be released. michelle: thank you. i understand we have another media question. we'll go to the audio line now. >> thank you, our next question from leo enright with irish television. your line is open. >> thanks very much. if i can just alm ar size -- summarize, if i understand my takeaway is confirmation of methane and also noticeably a thiopene in the subsoil. if i can ask what followup investigations specifically from europeans could support nd add to this, specifically the trace gas orbiter, resumably can do the kind of

isotopic analysis you can't. can you foresee that being abling to contribute and secondly, still with exo mars but in the future, they're talking about drilling several meters. chromatograph on x.o. mars the same as you have and can it do the work you say eeds to be done? exo starting with the mars mission, we're proud of the work our team did here at oddard to deliver a mass spectrometer for the rover planned to launch in 2020 and we greatly expand the techniques that we use there to

look at samples that come up from two meters below the surface. the first thing we do is totally different, it's never been done before on the surface of another planet. we use a laser basically to put a pulse of energy into the sample that's in front of the instruments and then we let some of those ions up into a ss speck tromter -- mass spectromoter, we can find a peak, and can do what's caw lled tandem mass spectrometry. we also have a g.c.m.s. that is a contribution from our french colleagues. they're really good at understanding how to do that separation of gases that jen lked about they do the derivitization chemistry that tries to pull out amino acids differently. we have a lot of fluid in a

cup. we puncture the cup and put sample in. they try to control that a little better by having basically a little container that will break apart at exactly the right temperature, t the deritization in and do separation. the technologies have advanced a bit. one thing we'd be interested in finding is the left and right hannedness of an amo noah acid if we're lucky enough to find an amino acid. they're not equivalent but in meteorites they're largely equivalent. we're trying to solve that as well. technology advances and our ability to think through what we can put in place on another planet advances and maybe chris should talk about what the european trace gap orbiter which is also looking for methane what they hep to find. i understand that's just getting going in operation around mars and they haven't been doing reporting yesterday

but -- yet. chris: yes, the exciting thing about c.b.o. as it's called, it's going to look at a lot of gases in the atmosphere but especially methane in particular. as paul said they started to make measurements, we're all waiting with baited breath to see what they find. but they're going to in particular by mapping it globally they'll be able to relate their measurements to ours. one thing that they could d is if they see large plumes somewhere even though they don't have a lot of spirble resolution they could potentially pinpoint or hone in on an area of mars that seems to be associated with the increase from the surface. that would be a very exciting find because it tells us where we need to go to to get the better signal when we look at it. and you asked thebtar bonn-13 isotope ratio. there's 100 time less carbon-13 methane than regular methane. if you want to measure that to 1% you're stuck with it extreme

hi high sensitivity needed. so as the trace gas orbiter sees significant amount of methane they'll be able to make that measurement but if they see mainly the low background levels that we are seing of .4 parts per billion it's going to e a challenge. michelle: we've had some technical answers here, i'd like to go to middle school students live fweeting us. mr. aldi's aerospoice class, they're asking about the implications, does this discovery have implicationses for the future colonyization of mars or human presence on mars? jen: it could. when eff organic materials in the rocks at the crater there might be wider spread. perhaps those would be a resource for humans. we don't know what that would be exactly, perhaps there's there are organisms there we don't know about yet. they might be helpful for farming. there might be organic

materials that could be used as fuel for both farming or organisms including plants that need carbon to turn it into their own buy y mass. and there's other ways to haveudesing it to generate fuels that people there would use. those have not been fully investigated yet. it's an open book on what technologies we might use in the future on mars. >> a follow-on question to this, mack said is it possible to bring samples back from mars. paul: that's a great question, ashwin is the perfect person to ask that. michelle: ashwin is it possible we might get samples back from mars? ashwin: we hope. so one thing we're working on is a mission called the mars 2020 rover. it has some really sophisticated instruments it's bringing with it to mars to do these investigations to look directly for signs of life but

it also is proposed to bring samples back to earth one day. it requires a few follow-on missions to do that. something to land a rocket on mars, and then to gather those samples from where 2020 has left them on the surface, to bring them back to the rocket and blast off from mars and hen to rendezvous with the space we've put in mars orbit and bring it back to earth. that's a lot of cool technology j.b.l. has to invent. michelle: we are planning to return to mars, one of the things we're trying to do is figure out where the best places to land next would be. there are some questions here about how are we determining the best places to, where to explore next on mars. jen: one of the big questions is where else are we going to find organic carbon? there are various environments on earth we understand as good places to collect organic materials that get preserved and it's also good places for

life. for instance a lake bed whike what we found in gail crater is a perfect example. there are others, hydrothermal systems where hot fluids an gases out of the ground can provide a lot of chemicals organisms can use. we see these on earth. there are records of rocks on mars that suggest there are ancient hydrothermal systems. that might be another place to look. right now the larger mars science community is talking about where it is they want to go. and these are some of the key scientific motivator for choosing place. paul: let me add to that a little bit. we have two things, we have a huge amount of day tark we have capable orbiters orbiting mars. on those we have imagers that can see a few feet, we can see our revers on the surface, we can see rover track. that's one tool we use. e other tool we use is

spectroscopy. one thing that brought us to gail crater was finding minerals that had been hydrated. but the other fun thing on mars, on earth it's hard to find old rocks because earth is see the still, you hawaii volcanos going off, the land is change, plate tectonics. in mars that stopped billions of years ago. half the surface practically is very, very, very old. we can get the ancient history of mars by landing on the surface and looking at what happened early in the history of the solar system. jen: that's right. the modern landscape is actually an ancient one. michelle: so another media question from the audio line. >> thank you. next question is from mike wall with space.com. your line is open. >> thank you guys. ppreciate your time. this is probably a question for ashwin or anybody else who wans

how do you think 's involved -- [inaudible] how co-you define the overall mission and what do you hope for? michelle: i hope that came through well. i believe they're asking about how the discoveries will fit in with the legacy of the mars curiosity rover and your view on that. comments from you? ashwin: it's a great question. sometimes being involved so deeply in the day-to-day you forget to look at the bigger picture. as i mentioned yerler -- earlier, the way i think about it is that we have a role in this ongoing exploration of mars that's now been going on for more than 50 years and will continue in the future as we t closer and closer to

determining if life ever originated on mars an eventually sending human there is an maybe colonizing mars one day. the role that curiosity was designed to play was to figure out if mars was habitable. we didn't know that before curiosity went there. we didn't know that lake survived on mars in the time period of millions of years ago. and we didn't know the extent that organic matter was present on mars, could be concentrated in these environments and would be preserved throughout the study today. those are big questions the mission was specifically designed to address. with these results you couldn't be -- i couldn't be happier in how we've been able to meet those objectives and provide them as material for future mission to use when they're designing where to go and how to accomplish their science. michelle: we just have a little time left. i think there's one more question from the media to sneak in. please go ahead. >> our next question is from

hillary, bs insider. your line is open. >> hi. thank you for taking my question. i wanted to ask a question methane, is it the rising summer temperatures warming those up and that's how they are releasing it? ris: there is -- they're created through high pressure initially, that i could be a source. but we don't believe, once you get urn the surface by several meters and below that you don't really have a seasonal cycle there. it's pretty constant temperature. so the rates and reservoirs might be leaking or seeping the methane continuously throughout the year. it's only when it gets to the surface where the surface temperature has that seasonal psych that will that modulates

the release of that methane into the atmosphere. i think that answers your question. michelle: that's actually all the time we have. if you submitted questions see ya -- via social media we didn't get to, we'll try to get to as many online as we can. thank you for joining us. have a great rest of the day. bye. >> coming up live shortly on c-span, from the g-7 summit in quebec a meeting between president trump and canadian prime minister justin trudeau. one of the issues on the table, new tariffs that were imposed by president trump on canada and other countries on fuel and alum numb imports. we're expecting this to start in about 15 minutes or so. i'll take you there live when it does. in the meantime, the faith and freedom coalition gathered for the second day of its 2018 conference in washington, d.c. one of the speakers was e.p.a.

administrator scott pruitt who talked about some of the changes taking place at his agency and how it's balancing economic factors with protecting the environment but he made no comments about recent allegations against him of improper spending or ethics violations. >> thank you. it's good to be back at faith and freedom. i appreciate ralph's kind words and all that he does to advance religious liberty and all you do we saw how important that was this week with jack phillips and the great victory at the u.s. supreme court that proteched the free exercise of the christian baker in colorado. we should celebrate that this week. [applause] and understand that it makes a difference. several years ago, i had the pleasure of traveling with my church to romania on a mission trip. the first time i'd take an trip