Mars rover ‘shake and bake’ cooks up a carbon mystery
NASA’s Curiosity rover has tasted carbon in Martian soil, sparking speculation as to its origin, and has also found that Mars prefers its hydrogen heavy.
A TANTALISING whiff of carbon-based compounds has been picked up by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover. But it’s still not clear whether the eagerly awaited results are revealing the true chemical nature of Mars or are instead the products of Earthly contaminants.
One of the goals of the NASA rover, which landed on the Red Planet on 6 August, is to search for signs that Mars might once have had the means to support life. One clue would be organics – carbon-containing compounds that are the building blocks of life as we know it. During Curiosity’s first “meals” of Martian soil, baked inside the robot’s ovens, carbon and hydrogen were found to have reacted with chlorine, creating organic molecules.
This taste of carbon is intriguing, but it is a far cry from recent feverish speculation that the rover had found definitive evidence for organic compounds on Mars.
“The rover has made this detection of simple organic compounds,” says project scientist John Grotzinger of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. But crucially, the rover only detected them after cooking them up. The mystery now is: where did it find that key ingredient – carbon?