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Mars Rover Spots Complex Carbon on the Red Planet, Marking Yet Another Detection of a Building Block of Life
Key takeaways
- Carlyn Kranking | Associate Web Editor, Science
- These compounds, known as macromolecular carbon, can be produced by living organisms, though that’s not the only way they might form.
- While these carbons are associated with fossilized microbes on Earth, the discovery isn’t a definitive sign of life.
Carlyn Kranking | Associate Web Editor, Science
Add as preferred source The Perseverance rover inspects a Martian rock called Cheyava Falls using its Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument. NASA / JPL-Caltech NASA’s Perseverance rover has detected complex molecules of carbon on the surface of Mars.
These compounds, known as macromolecular carbon, can be produced by living organisms, though that’s not the only way they might form. Researchers identified them in the Bright Angel outcrop, a rocky area of Mars that contains the “most robust” detections to date of organic material in the red planet’s Jezero Crater, according to a new paper published June 24 in the journal Science Advances.