A new technique implemented by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has helped uncover traces of previously unknown building blocks of life on this mysterious planet.
According to NASA, this was a completely unexpected discovery. Curiosity, a rover that has been “out of service” for many years but still operates well, continued its mission with expanded tasks, including sampling rocks at the base of Mount Sharp on Mars. However, its drill suddenly stopped functioning.
Rather than halting the entire aging machine to wait for gear replacement, NASA scientists decided to assign Curiosity a different task: instead of drilling rocks and grinding them into powder, it scooped up some sand from the nearby Ogunquit area to bring into its integrated “wet chemistry lab”, which includes nine solvent cups.
Curiosity, the rover launched by NASA to Mars in 2011, landed in 2012, and has continued to operate well to this day – Photo: NASA
According to Science Alert, the research team did not expect any new findings, as they believed that sand would be unlikely to store organic molecules—the primary target of Curiosity since its launch to Mars in 2011. They simply let it do something while waiting for the drill issue to be resolved.
However, when the chemicals broke down the outer layer of the sand, they identified signs of many organic compounds, such as ammonia and benzoic acid, as well as several organic compounds that had never been found before on Mars.
This event occurred in 2016 and was initially considered unimportant as it was not direct evidence of life. But after a period of evaluation, NASA scientists recently decided to publish their findings, believing that this would open up a new avenue—a different method for searching for life’s building blocks that could be applied to both Curiosity and more advanced robots and exploratory spacecraft in the future.
“This experiment has expanded the catalog of organic molecules present in Martian material samples and demonstrated the effectiveness of a powerful new tool for searching for other organic molecules related to life or prebiotic material,” stated biologist Maëva Millan from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Georgetown University, who leads the NASA research team.
The study was recently published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy.
