this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Astronomy

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Note: Organic matter does not mean life. It is a precursor to life. It does make the possibility of life on ancient Mars more likely.

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[–] TauZero@mander.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

Ah! This reference paper goes into more detail about how the reference spectra for the Raman fluorescence were acquired: https://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2022.0023 They built a fluorescence spectrometer identical to the SHERLOC tool onboard the Perseverance rover on Mars and tested it against a library of molecules of interest, including all L-amino acids and a few of the D-amino acids. Turns out the spectrometer cannot differentiate between the two:

The fluorescence spectra of d-phenylalanine and l-phenylalanine were almost identical, showing no obvious dependence on the chirality of the α-carbon.

Raman fluorescence spectra of 20 amino acids