\n\tPARIS: A NASA rover has discovered more building blocks of life on Mars after carrying out a chemistry experiment never before conducted on another planet, scientists said Tuesday.
The organic molecules are not definitive evidence of past life, the NASA-led team emphasized, because they could also have formed on the red planet or crash-landed on meteorites.
But it proves that these important clues to Martian history have been preserved on the surface for more than three billion years, they added.
Back then, the surface of Mars was thought to have been dotted with huge lakes and rivers full of liquid water, a key ingredient for life as we know it.
NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover landed in a former lake bed called the Gale crater in 2012, and has been searching for signs of possible past life since.
The car-sized rover carried two tubes of a chemical called TMAH, which can break apart organic matter to see what it is made out of.
\u201cThis experiment\u2019s never been run before on another world,\u201d Amy Williams, an astrobiologist working on the Curiosity mission told AFP.
The team were under pressure because they only had \u201ctwo shots to get it right,\u201d added Williams, the lead author of a new study describing the results.
The experiment, conducted in 2020, detected more than 20 organic molecules, including several that had never before been confirmed on Mars.
These included a molecule called benzothiophene, which has also been found in meteorites and asteroids.
\u201cThe same stuff that rained down on Mars from meteorites is what rained down on Earth, and it probably provided the building blocks for life as we know it on our planet,\u201d Williams said.
Another molecule containing nitrogen \u201cis a precursor to how DNA is eventually built,\u201d she added.
\u201cWe\u2019re seeing the building blocks for life \u2014 prebiotic chemistry on Mars \u2014 preserved in these rocks for billions of years.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tFuture missions\u00a0<\/p>\n
\tBut none of this can prove that life \u2014 even tiny, microbial organisms \u2014 once flourished on Mars.
One way to potentially make such an \u201cextraordinary claim\u201d would be to bring some Martian rocks back to Earth so scientists can study them more closely, Williams said.
NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover has already collected a bunch of rocks for such a mission, called Mars Sample Return.
However the mission has effectively been canceled by the administration of President Donald Trump following a US Congress vote in January.
Future missions could still benefit from Curiosity\u2019s demonstration that experiments using the TMAH chemical work on other worlds, the new study in Nature Communications said.
The European Space Agency\u2019s Rosalind Franklin rover, which has a much longer drill than Curiosity, will take the chemical to Mars.
After years of delays, NASA announced last week that the ESA\u2019s rover is now scheduled to blast off toward the red planet in late 2028.
The chemical will also be on board the Dragon rotorcraft, which is planned to launch in 2028 on a mission to explore Saturn\u2019s moon Titan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PARIS: A NASA rover has discovered more building blocks of life on Mars after carrying out a chemistry…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618642,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,66],"class_list":["post-618641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}