The Color Green
“Apparently the vegetable kingdom in Mars, instead of having green for a dominant colour, is of a vivid blood-red tint.”— H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, 1898
Probably one of the most fascinating articles about Mars I have ever read was by Nancy Y. Kiang, entitled “The Color of Life, on Earth and on Extrasolar Planets.” When we think of Mars, we fully realize there are no surface plants even without H.G. Wells’ speculations with today’s news and latest research. Since 1993, there have been over 200 giant planets discovered in solar systems other than our own. And with our advanced future telescope missions, we will find other signs and planets in the near future. Every mission has but one purpose—to find life outside our own system. But according to NASA, the scientists feel they need to also “discern the spectra of life that has evolved on planets orbiting parent stars very different from our Sun.”
6H2O + 6CO2 ———-> C6H12O6+ 6O2
The above chemical equation translates as; six molecules of water plus six molecules of carbon dioxide produce one molecule of sugar plus six molecules of oxygen–or– photosynthesis. And as we know on Earth, photosynthesis is the basis of life on Earth and provides our food, fuel, and oxygen. It is also the process that plants and some bacteria use the energy from sunlight to produce sugar, which the “cellular respiration” converts into ATP—the fuel by which all living things use. This conversion of the usable sunlight energy is associated with chlorophyll, the green pigment, into usable chemical energy. This process of photosynthesis uses water to release the oxygen that is so necessary for life.
Plants are a photosynthetic organism, and they have leaves. But not all plants have leaves. Instead—view the leaf by itself as a solar collector full of photosynthetic cells, where the raw materials, water and carbon dioxide, enter the leaf cells while the products of photosynthesis, sugar and oxygen, leave the leaf. But what does any of this have to do with Mars, or any space planet? Oxygen in the atmosphere and the surface spectrum that reflects land plants.
What this all amounts to is that green, yellow, and red-dominant plants could possibly live on extra-solar planets. Scientists have written two scientific papers in the March 2007 issues of Astrobiology that studied light absorbed and reflected by organisms on Earth. The determination is that if astronomers looked at the light given off by planets, which circled distant stars, the prediction could be that planets, or at least some some planets, have mostly non-green planets.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 6:36 am and is filed under Mission Objectives, Technical Concerns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
