TRANSCRIPT – Largest Organics Yet Discovered on Mars

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Narrator:

Life on Earth is made from cells. Cells are surrounded by membranes, and cell membranes contain large organic molecules called fatty acids.

Could these building blocks of life also exist on Mars? A new finding by NASA’s Curiosity rover has scientists speculating.

In 2013, Curiosity collected samples from a mudstone called “Cumberland,” leading to the discovery of small organic molecules like methane, chlorinated hydrocarbons and thiophene.

Now, for the first time, scientists have identified long-chain hydrocarbons within the Cumberland samples – the largest organic molecules yet discovered on Mars.

Curiosity’s onboard chemistry lab, called SAM for short, detected the hydrocarbons by using a new, dual-heating process that was developed after the rover landed.

Scientists hypothesize that the long-chain hydrocarbons may be byproducts of fatty acids disintegrated during heating by SAM.

If even longer hydrocarbon chains are present within the samples, SAM is not optimized to detect them. Instead, scientists hope to bring material from Mars to laboratories on Earth for more detailed analysis.

Twenty-three hundred miles away from Curiosity, at the site of an ancient lake in Jezero Crater, NASA’s Perseverance rover is already caching tantalizing samples for this purpose.

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