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Curiosity Rover Finds Ancient 'Building Blocks for Life' on Mars
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | June 7, 2018 02:01pm ET
If you're holding out hope that Mars may have once been an inhabited world, two new studies should put a little spring in your step.
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has identified a variety of organic molecules, the carbon-based building blocks of life as we know it, in 3.5-billion-year-old Red Planet rocks, one of the papers reports.
"These results do not give us any evidence of life," stressed study lead author Jennifer Eigenbrode, a scientist at the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. [The Search for Life on Mars: A Photo Timeline]
"But there is a possibility that [the organics] are from an ancient life source; we just don't know," Eigenbrode told Space.com. "And even if life was never around, they [the molecules] tell us there was at least something around for organisms to eat."
More:
https://www.space.com/40819-mars-methane-organics-curiosity-rover.html