Samples from the Curiosity rover reveal the same amount of organic carbon as some spots here on Earth.
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity used its right Mast Camera to take the telephoto images combined into this panorama of geological diversity.Early this year, the Curiosity rover revealed organic carbon, a key ingredient of life as we know it, on Mars. “We’re finding things on Mars that are tantalizingly interesting, but we would really need more evidence to say we’ve identified life,” said Paul Mahaffy, who served as the principal investigator for.
The samples Curiosity’s instruments analyzed, gathered from the Gale crater at the site of an ancient lake,in the same density that it exists in barren places on Earth, such as the Atacama Desert. Knowing how much of the stuff there is on Mars gives planetary scientists a better idea of just how likely it was that life was ever on the planet.
Carbon bound to a hydrogen atom is dubbed organic carbon, the compound that forms the basis of life—at least, as we define it here at home. But even though we know that, finding organic carbon doesn’t necessarily prove that the planet once had natives. Meteorites and volcanoes can also create deposits of the substance, for example.
The location where Curiosity dug up its samples does have other indicators that it could have once hosted life, points out Jennifer Stern, the lead author on thewhere the most recent findings were published, in a NASA blog post. “Basically, this location would have offered a habitable environment for life, if it ever was present,” she states. Samples of mudstone from the area include nitrogen and oxygen, for instance, and have low levels of acidity.
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