A team of scientists has managed to test a sample of Martian dirt, extracted by NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover in March 2017, by instructing the rover to mix it with chemical reagents. This mixture released organic molecules which the space agency has never detected on the surface of the Red Planet before, reports Inverse. While the discovery might be exciting, it did not demonstrate that carbon-based lifeforms once lived on Mars. It is, however, a step in the same direction.
“This experiment was definitely successful,” Maëva Millan, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center and lead author of a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, told Inverse. “While we haven’t found what we were looking for, biosignatures, we showed that this technique is really promising,” she added.
Possible signs of ancient life
The experiment “has expanded the inventory of molecules present in Martian samples and demonstrated a powerful tool to further enable the search for polar organic molecules of biotic or prebiotic relevance,” Millan and her team wrote in the research paper.
The two chemicals found in the mix were benzoic acid and ammonia, both possible indicators of ancient life. “One of the things that we were trying to look for [when searching for] organic molecule on Mars is to understand the past habitability of Mars and to look for bioindicators,” Millan told Inverse.
Researchers hoping to find the origin
The team hopes to find the molecules “parents,” or where they came from. Millan and her colleagues suggest that they could be due to geological processes. This isn’t the first time Curiosity has found organic molecules on Mars, but the latest discovery expands the list of such molecules discovered by the space agency.
The news follows the detection of the presence of “thiophenes,” by a team of international astrobiologists. Thiophenes are special compounds that are found in coal, crude oil, and white truffles on our planet. The team analyzed samples collected by the Curiosity rover. The team hints in March last year, the thiophenes could be a sign of ancient life on the Red Planet, but more research is required.
