[meteorite-list] Bubbling up Organics in an Ocean Vent Simulator

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2013 15:13:08 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <201301162313.r0GND8FT004646_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-023

Bubbling up Organics in an Ocean Vent Simulator
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
January 16, 2013

This week, fizzy ocean water and the alkaline fluid that bubbles up from
deep ocean vents are coursing through a structure at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. that is reminiscent of the
pillared Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz. Scientists with the NASA
Astrobiology Institute's JPL Icy Worlds team have built this series of
glass tubes, thin barrels and valves with a laser and a detector system.
The set-up mimics the conditions at hydrothermal vents at the bottom of
Earth's ocean and also detects compounds coming out of it. They want to
see if sending these two liquids through a sample of rock that simulates
ancient volcanic ocean crust can lead to the formation of simple organic
molecules such as ethane and methane, and amino acids, biologically
important organic molecules. Scientists have long considered these
compounds the precursor ingredients for what later led to chains of RNA,
DNA and microbes.

A group of researchers at JPL, including senior geologist Mike Russell,
Icy Worlds Principal Investigator Isik Kanik, postdoctoral fellow Laurie
Barge, graduate student Lauren White and visiting scholar Takazo
Shibuya, have been testing this "origin of life" theory in a
refrigerator-sized apparatus at an annex to the Microdevices Laboratory
at JPL. The latest segment of the experiment, which is running this
week, will track the transformation of carbon molecules into the
hydrocarbons methane and ethane. Scientists want to know where the
carbon for the organic molecules originates.

"What we're trying to do is to climb down and create the conditions for
the very first steps to the beginning of life as we know it," said
Russell, who is leading the experiment. "That's the hard part." The
experiment is a key component of the Icy Worlds project, which is
managed at JPL for the NASA Astrobiology Institute, based at NASA's Ames
Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. The project aims to learn more
about potentially habitable environments such as Mars, as well as liquid
water environments on icy bodies like Saturn's moon Enceladus and
Jupiter's moon Europa. "If this ocean experiment is successful,
scientists would have a better handle on where to look for the building
blocks of life on Earth and beyond, and what signatures we should be
looking for of life and of habitable environments in the solar system,"
said Kanik.

This experiment has its roots in a theory from Russell in 1989 that
moderately warm, alkaline hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean
could have hatched life about 4 billion years ago. The ancient ocean at
these vents contains carbon dioxide, which provides the supply of carbon
that could be reassembled into organic molecules. In 2000, such a vent
was discovered at the bottom of the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The
vent later showed signs of generating simple organic molecules.

The scientists have tagged isotopes of carbon dioxide and dissolved them
in briny ocean-like water, creating a fizzy sample that would probably
taste like salty soda. They made an alkaline solution by dissolving
sodium hydroxide in water to simulate the fluids coming out of these
kinds of hydrothermal vents. Scientists will alternately send the two
solutions through a thin barrel of iron-magnesium-silica-volcanic-type
rock that was synthesized by Shibuya, so it doesn't have any of the
existing life that would be found in actual ocean crust samples. A
tunable diode laser -- a twin of one presently operating on NASA's Mars
Curiosity rover -- is used to search for methane, ethane and other
volatiles in the solution that flows out.

The experiment runs as close a simulation to the conditions of these
hydrothermal vents as is feasible in a lab setting - at 100 times the
pressure of Earth's surface and at about 90 degrees Celsius (about 200
degrees Fahrenheit). Scientists are alternating the fluid flows to
simulate the circulation at the ocean floor.

Founded in 1998, the NASA Astrobiology Institute is a partnership
between NASA, 15 U.S. teams, and six international consortia. NAI's
goals are to promote, conduct, and lead interdisciplinary astrobiology
research, train a new generation of astrobiology researchers, and share
the excitement of astrobiology with learners of all ages. The NAI is
part of NASA's Astrobiology program, which supports research into the
origin, evolution, distribution and future of life on Earth and the
potential for life elsewhere. For more information, visit
http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/.

JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena.

Jia-Rui Cook 818-354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
jccook at jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Jenvey 650-604-4789
Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
karen.jenvey at nasa.gov

2013-023
Received on Wed 16 Jan 2013 06:13:08 PM PST


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