NASA finds Titan's lakes may be creating vesicles with primitive cell walls

This feels very cynical, but what incentive does NASA have to do research showing alien life is not very likely in our solar system?

This is a point I keep making: every one of NASA’s Mars missions has very carefully excluded any scientific instrument that could conclusively eliminate the presence of life... and hence future missions to find life.

I.e.: they don’t carry high power microscopes because apparently there’s no room for one on a 900kg rover the size of a car.

> they don’t carry high power microscopes because apparently there’s no room for one on a 900kg rover the size of a car

They do though:

"The WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) is a reflight of the MAHLI (MArs Hand Lens Imager) that is a part of the Curiosity rover (Edgett et al., 2012). WATSON obtains full-color images from microscopic scales (∼13 μm/pixel) to infinity and is used for initial textural analysis of rock and regolith targets, as well as to assess potential proximity science targets and the safety of robotic arm activities (Edgett et al., 2012). The ACI (Autofocus Contextual Imager) is a fixed field, 10.1 μm/pixel resolution grayscale imager used to obtain best-focus and colocate laser spots with surface feature analyzed during SHERLOC spectroscopic investigations (Bhartia et al., 2021)."

From: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022EA00...

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseverance_(rover)#Instrumen...

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/scie...

They do not, because that's not high power microscope. I chose my words carefully.

10-13 μm per pixel is nowhere near good enough when a typical bacterium is 0.5 - 5.0 μm in size!

I remember the discussions around the mission plan for both Opportunity and Curiosity where NASA kept making "mumbly" noises about why they can't ship decent optics with these things.

Anything that would definitely eliminate (not just "potentially find") the presence of either life or water is never included. It's always omitted, for "reasons".

Water and life must forever remain possible things for the funding to keep flowing.