The question <\/p>\n
The team behind this portion of NASA\u2019s multifaceted Curiosity mission took a strategic step back from the weightier, big-ticket questions, like \u201cIs there life on Mars?\u201d or even \u201cDid life ever exist on Mars?\u201d\u00a0Ultimately, the team chased down a more fundamental question: \u201cHas Mars ever been conducive to the generation of the kinds of basic molecular compounds that are required to sustain carbon-based life, at least as we know it, here on Earth?\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Curiosity](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Curiosity-drill-holes-Mary-Anning.jpg\")
NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover located the organic molecules by drilling into clay sediments at a location that the team nicknamed after the 19th-century paleontologist Mary Anning. Credit: NASA \/ JPL-Caltech \/ MSSS <\/p>\n
Geophysicist and planetary scientist Ashwin Vasavada\u2014who leads NASA\u2019s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission team for Curiosity from his post at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California\u2014framed it another way in his 2022 mission overview<\/a>. NASA\u2019s MSL team, he wrote, seeks to discover whether or not Mars ever had \u201cpotentially habitable ancient environments.\u201d<\/p>\n The results <\/p>\n The subset of NASA\u2019s MSL team that remotely operates its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument onboard Curiosity discovered seven diverse organic molecules preserved in clay, where they were likely bonded to that clay, just under the subsurface of Gale Crater. Those carbon-based molecules were trimethylbenzene, tetramethylbenzene, methyl benzoate (AKA, benzoic acid methyl ester), dihydronaphthalene, naphthalene, benzothiophene, and methylnaphthalene.<\/p>\n The discovery of these compounds\u00a0confirmed two things, according to Amy Williams, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Florida who led this study for NASA\u2019s SAM instrument team.<\/p>\n First, it showed that the infamous lack of a decent magnetosphere<\/a> needed to protect Mars from solar radiation and other cosmic rays<\/a>\u00a0was not so bad that these organic compounds couldn\u2019t remain relatively intact a small distance beneath the Martian surface. Second\u2014by dint of how the SAM instrument performs its chemical tests from its compartments inside Curiosity\u2014these discoveries imply that several of the seven organic compounds were chemical byproducts broken off of bigger and even more complex organic molecules preserved in the Martian clay.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of folks are like, \u2018Oh, complex organic carbon! That must be life!\u2019\u201d Williams told Gizmodo. \u201cUnfortunately, for life-detection studies, you can get that kind of thing forming abiotically on meteorites. It just depends on what the type of macromolecular carbon is.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, the most cautious working hypothesis is that what Williams and the SAM team call<\/a> the compounds\u2019 \u201cindigenous macromolecular source\u201d\u2014the larger, life-relevant molecules they came from\u2014originated in a meteoroid early in the solar system\u2019s history. It would have been just one among many that have buried themselves into the Martian dirt across the planet\u2019s 4.5-billion-year lifetime.<\/p>\n To put it mildly, the implications, while not exactly evidence of Topps trading card Martians<\/a>, are exceedingly promising. The SAM team\u2019s find implies that ancient Mars was, at a minimum, bombarded with the same kinds of carbon-rich meteorites that almost assuredly seeded complex organic molecules on our own ancient Earth. And, even better, Mars has now proven itself capable of retaining these essential building blocks for life under its soil across billions of years. That\u2019s great news for aspiring Martian explorers of all tax brackets.<\/p>\n \u201cAt least some subset of the molecules that we saw are very consistent with what we see from carbonaceous chondrites and [other] meteorites,\u201d Williams told Gizmodo.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s still hope that Gale Crater\u2019s as-yet-unknown and more complex organic carbons might be something that really was created by alien life indigenous to Mars.<\/p>\n Curiosity\u2019s SAM instrument is, in brief, a first-of-its-kind, remotely operated, rugged, and interplanetary wet chemistry lab. It crams a bench top\u2019s worth of lab-grade scientific testing equipment into a spacefaring device about the size of a 1970s microwave. To analyze the chemical make-up of its test samples, SAM\u2019s Flight Model gas chromatograph-mass spectrometry (GC\/MS) tool<\/a> is, by necessity, a hands-free device that breaks down the complex compounds unearthed by the Curiosity rover into smaller, more gaseous, and more easily testable organic compounds.<\/p>\n \u201cSome people may be disappointed, \u2018Oh, you can\u2019t say that you found this more complex molecule or that more complex thing,\u2019\u201d Williams explained to Gizmodo. \u201cAnd that\u2019s okay in this study, I think, because what we\u2019ve demonstrated is that there is more complex organic matter [on Mars]. We broke it apart with the experiment.\u201d<\/p>\n Why they did it <\/p>\n A crucial thing to understand about the SAM team\u2019s discovery this year is that it\u2019s over two decades in the making\u2014a success born of the kind of long-term planning and disciplined continuity<\/a> of capabilities that only big institutions like NASA would probably even bother attempting. The concept of developing a miniature automated chemistry lab under the SAM acronym, in fact, dates at least as far back<\/a> as 2004, when the idea was first laid out at the 35th Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) Scientific Assembly, cohosted<\/a> by the European Space Agency in Paris.<\/p>\n Back when William Brinckerhoff, then an applied physics researcher at Johns Hopkins, co-authored these early SAM proposals, the goal of hunting for Martian organics had emerged in direct response to these molecules\u2019 eerie absence during NASA\u2019s Viking missions in the late 1970s.<\/p>\n \u201cWith Viking, we really didn\u2019t see anything. We saw maybe two molecules\u2014and it took a lot of reinterpretation to say why we were missing the organics there,\u201d Williams explained.<\/p>\n The Viking mission had conducted its own GC\/MS experiment, which, as Brinckerhoff and his colleagues put<\/a> it in their preliminary study into SAM\u2019s feasibility, might have \u201cdestroyed\u201d otherwise detectable Martian amino acids via heating during that process. Vikings\u2019 system was also not sensitive enough to detect modest traces of other organic compounds like amines.<\/p>\n \u201cFurthermore, Viking sampled only the first centimeters in depth of the Martian ground, where the organic material has been oxidized\/destroyed by atmospheric H2O2 [i.e., the bleaching agent, hydrogen peroxide \u2026] or by atomic oxygen,\u201d Brinckerhoff and his coauthors wrote.<\/p>\n But \u201cabsence of evidence is not evidence of absence,\u201d as everyone from space science luminary Carl Sagan to fictional FBI agent Fox Mulder has said about the search for extraterrestrial life. Good science means that, when your Viking space probe doesn\u2019t find any interesting carbon molecules after scraping down only a few centimeters into the Martian dirt\u2014then you just gotta send out another probe that can dig deeper.<\/p>\n Why they\u2019re a winner <\/p>\n In short, this was hard. It is self-evidently an important and valuable contribution to our understanding of the potential for life beyond Earth, but when giving out an award, sometimes, special dispensations should be granted when the achievement itself was just so very, very hard. Beyond that, it has also been clearly a long and winding road. Brinckerhoff, for example, is still a co-investigator on SAM now, 22 years later, in his current role at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center.<\/p>\n \u201cFolks built this instrument [SAM] when I was still in college,\u201d Williams, who is now a mom, told Gizmodo. \u201cAnd now I had the opportunity to help lead one of these experiments, and now my grad students are working with those data to try to further our interpretations of what we see in the noise of this experiment. So, it\u2019s a generational thing for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n There were unexpected setbacks too. NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover had been designed, among other things, to drill boreholes into the Gale Crater\u2019s lakebed for the extraction of deep samples\u2014but, on December 1, 2016, its drill\u2019s retractable motor got stuck<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cJust before we climbed over a ridge and we\u2019re about to drop into this clay-bearing unit for the first time, this motor stops working,\u201d MSL\u2019s team lead at NASA JPL, Ashwin Vasavada, told Gizmodo. \u201cAnd, if we had never got it to move, we would have never drilled again in the whole mission [\u2026] We would never have had [the] new paper.\u201d<\/p>\n What followed was about a year\u2019s worth of high-stakes drama, Apollo 13 meets Wall-E, as Vasavada and his team of scientists and engineers remotely troubleshooted their scrappy, six-wheeled Mars robot. \u201cWe kinda coaxed the motor to move, in its half-broken state, to where it was sticking out beyond the prongs,\u201d Vasavada recalled.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had to basically teach the rover all over again how to drill rocks,\u201d he told Gizmodo. \u201cWe had to learn ourselves, using our test bed on Earth. Then we had to code up new flight software to teach the rover.\u201d<\/p>\n While Curiosity\u2019s SAM wet chemistry lab had dozens of little Keurig-like travel cups of chemical reagent with which to dissolve clay samples for its GC\/MS molecular testing, it only had two cups of the more unique reagent needed for this study, tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH). And, by the time the team had landed on the right spot to drill for this fateful testing, the year was 2020\u2014a time when, as you may recall, the world was in a pandemic lockdown over a novel coronavirus<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cOur entire JPL team, in about a week, learned how to do everything we used to do in a room together here [\u2026] with all of our fancy monitors and equipment [\u2026] from our laptops and monitors in our living rooms,\u201d Vasavada said.<\/p>\n Beyond more roving science experiments around Gale Crater for Curiosity and more analysis of the data it collects back here on Earth, the team\u2019s success has inspired a next-generation version of its SAM instrument, called the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer. This new remote wet chemistry lab will launch with the European Space Agency\u2019s Rosalind Franklin Mars rover<\/a> in 2028. And another similar instrument is scheduled to venture to Saturn\u2019s moon Titan onboard NASA\u2019s Dragonfly rotorcraft<\/a> that same year.<\/p>\n The team <\/p>\n Team members included Amy J. Williams, from the University of Florida\u2019s Department of Geological Sciences; Ashwin R. Vasavada, from NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who now serves as the project scientist for NASA\u2019s Mars Science Laboratory; the dearly<\/a> departed<\/a> NASA astrobiologist Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez (1959-2021) with the National Autonomous University of Mexico; analytical chemist Caroline Freissinet with the Laboratory for Atmospheres, Observations, and Space (LATMOS) in France; astrobiologist Jennifer L. Eigenbrode; and countless other scientists at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, as well as many, many, more dedicated researchers who share in this achievement.<\/p>\n![\"Nasa](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/NASA-Curiosity-rover-loading-SAM-224x336.jpg\")
Technicians and engineers inside a clean room at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Lab flipped Curiosity onto its back to lower the gold-plated SAM instrument into the Mars rover on January 6, 2011. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech <\/p>\n![\"Curiosity](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Curiosity-Rover-Test-Drive-JPL.jpg\")
A NASA clean-room team monitors the first drive test of NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover all the way back on July 23, 2010. Credit: NASA \/ JPL-Caltech <\/p>\n![\"Covid](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/covid-remote-NASA-curiosity-team.jpeg\")
NASA\u2019s Curiosity team had to reconfigure JPL\u2019s mission control room into something that could be operated remotely across living rooms and home offices during the covid-19 lockdown. Credits: NASA \/ JPL-Caltech What\u2019s next <\/p>\n