NASA'S Perseverance Finds Organic Chemicals On Mars

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has found life's building blocks on the Red Planet, Mike Wall reported for Space.com.

Photo Insert: Perseverance's sample collecting mechanism

Perseverance has identified carbon-containing organic chemicals in some of the rocks it has examined on the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater, mission team members announced on Wednesday, Dec. 15.

To be clear: This is not a detection of Mars life. Organics can be produced by both biological and non-biological means, and more work is needed to figure out what processes generated the Jezero compounds.

Perseverance won't have to do all that work by itself; the rover is collecting samples that will be hauled to Earth by a joint NASA/European Space Agency campaign, perhaps as early as 2031.

"This is a question that may not be solved until the samples are returned to Earth, but the preservation of organics is very exciting," Luther Beegle, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in a statement.

"When these samples are returned to Earth, they will be a source of scientific inquiry and discovery for many years," added Beegle, the principal investigator of Perseverance's SHERLOC ("Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals") instrument.

The car-sized Perseverance landed last February inside the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero, which hosted a big lake and a river delta in the ancient past. Perseverance has two main mission goals: search for signs of ancient life on Mars and collect the material for humanity's first Mars sample-return effort.

Toward this latter end, the rover carries 43 titanium tubes, six of which it has sealed to date. Four of the sealed tubes contain cored rock samples, one has a sample of Martian atmosphere, and one harbors "witness" material to help mission team members spot any contaminating compounds that Perseverance may have brought from Earth, JPL officials said in the same statement.

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