Okay so remember two weeks ago when John Grotzinger, the guy running the science side of the Curiosity mission, told NPR that some new data from the rover was "gonna be one for the history books"? I remember it because I read that line, closed my laptop, and spent the rest of the night assuming NASA had found something insane on Mars. Not "insane" like a new mineral. Insane like life. Half the internet did the same thing. It was a bad week to be a person who reads too many space blogs before bed.
NASA held the actual press conference today at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, and, well, its not aliens. The SAM instrument (Sample Analysis at Mars, its the onboard chemistry lab that basically cooks soil samples and sniffs what comes off) found some organic compounds, some simple carbon-containing molecules, in a scoop of sand from a spot called Rocknest. That's genuinely interesting if youre a planetary scientist. Organics on Mars is a real, non-trivial finding, its the kind of thing that feeds into the whole "was there ever life here" question. But the caveat that got buried under two weeks of speculation is that some of what SAM is picking up might just be contamination the rover brought with it from Earth. So even the scientists cant say for sure yet what's Martian and whats just leftover cleaning fluid residue from a lab in Pasadena.
Which is, you have to admit, a pretty deflating way for "one for the history books" to resolve itself.
Im not even mad at NASA here, to be clear. Grotzinger didnt say "we found life," he said the data would be historically significant, and technically any organics detection on Mars probably is, in the slow-grinding way that actual science usually is significant. The problem was entirely downstream of him. It was every outlet (mine included, if Im honest, I definitely wrote a tweet implying something bigger was coming) taking one enthusiastic soundbite and running a two-week hype cycle on it with basically zero new information to fill the space. Thats the part that bugs me. We didnt get more details as the days went on. We just got more speculation stacked on top of the same six words, like a game of telephone played entirely by people with press credentials.
Ive been doing this blog for about a year now and Ive noticed this pattern a bunch of times, actually, not just with NASA. Somebody says something vague and confident-sounding, and instead of anyone going "huh, wonder what that means, guess well find out," the entire tech press treats the vagueness itself as the story. You get days of "sources say" and "could this mean" posts that are really just recycling the same non-quote in a new outfit. Its cheap content to produce and it gets clicks, so I get why it happens, I just dont love watching it happen in real time to a story I actually care about.
Anyway. Curiositys still up there, still doing its slow methodical thing, and honestly the mission itself has been the good kind of exciting all year, the sky crane landing back in August still gives me chills when I think about it too hard. Todays announcement doesnt need to be a letdown just because two weeks of internet speculation made it feel like one. Organics in Martian soil, confirmed or contamination or somewhere in between, is a genuinely cool data point from a rover the size of a car that we drove to another planet with a rocket-powered hovering crane. Im choosing to be happy about that part and mildly annoyed at all of us, myself included, for turning "one for the history books" into a two week guessing game about extraterrestrial life.
Lesson learned, probably wont stop me from falling for it next time a scientist says something coy on the radio though.