Illustration of NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars.NASA
NASA’s Perseverance rover has identified organics in Jezero Crater on Mars. Astrobiologists are interested in organics because some of these carbon-based molecules are used as the building blocks for life as we know it. The presence of organics on Mars adds to the story of the planet’s habitability, increasing the available ingredients needed for biology.
Previously, NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered organics in Gale Crater, but the molecules identified by Perseverance are found in rocks that are very different from those spotted by Curiosity.
Perseverance has collected dozens of cores from rocks on Mars and has stored these samples in special tubes so that they can be retrieved by the Mars Sample Return mission. If successful, samples of the martian organics could be analyzed in detail by scientists on Earth in the near future.
The new findings have been reported in a collection of papers published in the journal Science.
Tice, M.M. et al. (2022) “Alteration history of Séítah formation rocks inferred by PIXL x-ray fluorescence, x-ray diffraction, and multispectral imaging on Mars, Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abp9084
Scheller, E.L. et al. (2022) “Aqueous alteration processes in Jezero crater, Mars−implications for organic geochemistry,” Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/science.abo5204
Bell, J.F. III et al. (2022) “Geological, multispectral, and meteorological imaging results from the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover in Jezero crater,” Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo4856
Click here to read more about the findings from Many Worlds.
The Many Worlds Blog chronicles the search for evidence of life beyond Earth written by author/journalist Marc Kaufman. The “Many Worlds” column is supported by the Lunar Planetary Institute/USRA and informed by NASA’s NExSS initiative, a research coordination network supported by the NASA Astrobiology Program. Any opinions expressed are the author’s alone.