Life on Mars? Rover’s Latest Discovery Puts It ‘On the Table’

The identification of organic molecules in rocks on the red planet does not necessarily point to life there, past or present, but does indicate that some of the building blocks were present.
por By Kenneth Chang

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In 2015, the Curiosity rover drilled into a mudstone called "Mojave." Analysis of those drill cuttings yielded organic molecules.CreditNASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Scientists for the first time have confidently identified on Mars a collection of carbon molecules used and produced by living organisms.
That does not prove that life has ever existed on Mars. The same carbon molecules, broadly classified as organic matter, also exist within meteorites that fall from space. They can also be produced in chemical reactions that do not involve biology.
But the discovery, published on Thursday by the journal Science, is a piece of the Mars puzzle that scientists have long been seeking. In 1976, NASA’s two Viking landers conducted the first experiments searching for organic matter on Mars and appeared to come up empty.
“Now things are starting to make more sense,” said Jennifer L. Eigenbrode, a biogeochemist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and lead author of the Science paper. “We still don’t know the source of them, but they’re there. They’re not missing any more.”
The data comes from NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has been exploring a former lake bed within the 96-mile Gale Crater where it landed in 2012. The discovery shows that organic molecules can be preserved near the Martian surface, surviving the bombardment of radiation from the sun.

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A self-portrait of Curiosity from 2013.CreditNASA
“It’s very exciting for Mars geology and for the search for life,” said Sanjeev Gupta, a professor of earth sciences at Imperial College London in England, who was a co-author on the paper.
A second paper in Science adds wrinkles in the Martian puzzle of methane — a simple molecule of one carbon and four hydrogen atoms — that could also play an important part in figuring out whether life ever arose there and might even persist underground today.
The organic matter was found in pieces of solidified mud that Curiosity drilled into in 2015. The rocks formed about 3.5 billion years ago when Mars was drying out, although Gale Crater was still filled with water for stretches of thousands to millions of years.

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