While the Cumberland sample may contain longer chains of fatty acids, SAM is not designed to detect them. But SAM’s ability to spot these larger molecules suggests it could detect similar chemical signatures of past life on Mars if they’re present, Williams said.
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“Curiosity is not a life detection mission,” Freissinet said. “Curiosity is a habitability detection mission to know if all the conditions were right … for life to evolve. Having these results, it’s really at the edge of the capabilities of Curiosity, and it’s even maybe better than what we had expected from this mission.”

Before sending missions to Mars, scientists didn’t think organic molecules would be found on the red planet because of the intensity of radiation Mars has long endured, Glavin said.
Curiosity won’t return to Yellowknife Bay during its mission, but there are still pristine pieces of the Cumberland sample aboard. Next, the team wants to design a new experiment to see what it can detect. If the team can identify similar long-chain molecules, it would mark another step forward that might help researchers determine their origins, Freissinet said.

“That’s the most precious sample we have on board … waiting for us to run the perfect experiment on it,” she said. “It holds secrets, and we need to decipher the secrets.”

Briony Horgan, coinvestigator on the Perseverance rover mission and professor of planetary science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, called the detection “a big win for the whole team.” Horgan was not involved the study.
“This detection really confirms our hopes that sediments laid down in ancient watery environments on Mars could preserve a treasure trove of organic molecules that can tell us about everything from prebiotic processes and pathways for the origin of life, to potential biosignatures from ancient organisms,” Horgan said.

Dr. Ben K.D. Pearce, assistant professor in Purdue’s department of Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences and leader of the Laboratory for Origins and Astrobiology Research, called the findings “arguably the most exciting organic detection to date on Mars.” Pearce did not participate in the research.

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Space, time: The continual question
If time moves differently on the peaks of mountains than the shores of the ocean, you can imagine that things get even more bizarre the farther away from Earth you travel.
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To add more complication: Time also passes slower the faster a person or spacecraft is moving, according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity.

Astronauts on the International Space Station, for example, are lucky, said Dr. Bijunath Patla, a theoretical physicist with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, in a phone interview. Though the space station orbits about 200 miles (322 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, it also travels at high speeds — looping the planet 16 times per day — so the effects of relativity somewhat cancel each other out, Patla said. For that reason, astronauts on the orbiting laboratory can easily use Earth time to stay on schedule.
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For other missions — it’s not so simple.

Fortunately, scientists already have decades of experience contending with the complexities.

Spacecraft, for example, are equipped with their own clocks called oscillators, Gramling said.

“They maintain their own time,” Gramling said. “And most of our operations for spacecraft — even spacecraft that are all the way out at Pluto, or the Kuiper Belt, like New Horizons — (rely on) ground stations that are back on Earth. So everything they’re doing has to correlate with UTC.”
But those spacecraft also rely on their own kept time, Gramling said. Vehicles exploring deep into the solar system, for example, have to know — based on their own time scale — when they are approaching a planet in case the spacecraft needs to use that planetary body for navigational purposes, she added.

For 50 years, scientists have also been able to observe atomic clocks that are tucked aboard GPS satellites, which orbit Earth about 12,550 miles (20,200 kilometers) away — or about one-nineteenth the distance between our planet and the moon.

Studying those clocks has given scientists a great starting point to begin extrapolating further as they set out to establish a new time scale for the moon, Patla said.

“We can easily compare (GPS) clocks to clocks on the ground,” Patla said, adding that scientists have found a way to gently slow GPS clocks down, making them tick more in-line with Earth-bound clocks. “Obviously, it’s not as easy as it sounds, but it’s easier than making a mess.”

‘A whole different mindset’
Accurate clockwork is one matter. But how future astronauts living and working on the lunar surface will experience time is a different question entirely.
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On Earth, our sense of one day is governed by the fact that the planet completes one rotation every 24 hours, giving most locations a consistent cycle of daylight and darkened nights. On the moon, however, the equator receives roughly 14 days of sunlight followed by 14 days of darkness.

“It’s just a very, very different concept” on the moon, Betts said. “And (NASA is) talking about landing astronauts in the very interesting south polar region (of the moon), where you have permanently lit and permanently shadowed areas. So, that’s a whole other set of confusion.”
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“It’ll be challenging” for those astronauts, Betts added. “It’s so different than Earth, and it’s just a whole different mindset.”

That will be true no matter what time is displayed on the astronauts’ watches.

Still, precision timekeeping matters — not just for the sake of scientifically understanding the passage of time on the moon but also for setting up all the infrastructure necessary to carry out missions.

The beauty of creating a time scale from scratch, Gramling said, is that scientists can take everything they have learned about timekeeping on Earth and apply it to a new system on the moon.

And if scientists can get it right on the moon, she added, they can get it right later down the road if NASA fulfills its goal of sending astronauts deeper into the solar system.

“We are very much looking at executing this on the moon, learning what we can learn,” Gramling said, “so that we are prepared to do the same thing on Mars or other future bodies.”