Spirit and Opportunity's finds helped pave the way for NASA's 1-ton Curiosity rover, which landed inside Mars' huge Gale Crater in August 2012 to determine if the Red Planet could ever have supported microbial life.Ĭuriosity found a potentially habitable lake system that dates from around 3.7 billion years ago. "The older you look, the better it gets in terms of habitability at this location." "If I were there back when this material was being emplaced and altered, and I had my summer house, this is where I would drill to get good drinking water," Arvidson said during Thursday's press conference. On Thursday, for instance, mission scientists announced that the rover had found evidence of a potentially life-supporting environment in four-billion-year-old rocks on the rim of Endeavour Crater, which Opportunity has been exploring since August 2011. Since silica forms when hot water reacts with rocks, the area likely once had two key ingredients necessary for life as we know it - liquid water and an energy source.Īnd Opportunity has made its share of big discoveries as well, some of them coming quite recently. In 2007, for example, Spirit unearthed deposits of pure silica when its crippled right front wheel dug a furrow in the red dirt. NASA dispatched Spirit and Opportunity to search for signs of past water activity on Mars, whose surface is very cold and dry today.īoth rovers found plenty of such evidence at their disparate landing sites. (Image credit: by Karl Tate, Infographics Artist) See the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity worked in this infographic. The scientists detailed their findings online today (July 12) in the journal Nature.For more than 10 years the robots have roved across Mars, making exciting discoveries about water in the planet's past. "To confirm the presence of organics and their specific types, we would need the samples to be returned to Earth," Sharma said. The scientists could not identify specific organic molecules. "That opens the possibility of different formation, preservation or transportation mechanisms across the crater and, more broadly, the surface of Mars." "Seeing that the possible organic signals differ in terms of type, number of detections and distribution between the two units of the crater floor was surprising and exciting," Sharma said. These organic compounds mostly appeared connected to minerals linked to water. These occurred in a variety of patterns in space within Máaz and Séítah, suggesting they might have originated from a number of different minerals and mechanisms of formation. The scientists discovered evidence of many different classes of organic molecules. NASA photos show the Perseverance Mars rover and tiny Ingenuity helicopter from space Happy anniversary, Perseverance! NASA rover marks 2 years on Mars Perseverance rover collects Mars samples rich in 'organic matter' for future return to Earth These "point to the possibility that building blocks of life could have been present for a long time on the surface of Mars, in more than one place," Sharma said. Sharma and her colleagues found signs of organic molecules in all 10 targets that Perseverance drilled into at Máaz and Séítah, covering a span of time from at least about 2.3 billion to 2.6 billion years ago. The fingerprint of wavelengths in the glow from a molecule can help identify it. When ultraviolet light from SHERLOC illuminates organic compounds, they can glow much like material beneath a blacklight. The researchers focused on SHERLOC data from Máaz and Séítah, two rock formations on the Jezero Crater floor. SHERLOC is the first tool on Mars capable of conducting fine-scale mapping and analysis of organic molecules. Specifically, the scientists examined data from the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument onboard Perseverance. The crater floor also possesses clays and other minerals that may preserve organic materials. In February 2021, the rover landed within Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake basin that prior work suggested displayed high potential for past habitability. In the new study, Sharma and her colleagues analyzed data from Perseverance. "As planetary scientists and astrobiologists, we are very careful with laying out claims - claiming that life is the source of organics or possible biosignatures is a last-resort hypothesis, meaning we would need to rule out any non-biological source of origin," Sharma said.
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