Life on Mars? Recent discovery by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover supports previous evidence on a ‘Gray Mars’

Is there life on Mars? This question has been asked and investigated a number of times ever since Percival Lowell saw what he thought were canals on the red planet, and H.G. Wells wrote ‘War of the Worlds.’ The most recent analysis of a rock sample by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover appears to support theories that, in its past, Mars could have supported life.

“We have characterized a very ancient, but strangely new ‘gray Mars’ where conditions once were favorable for life,” said John Grotzinger, Mars Science Laboratory project scientist at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. “Curiosity is on a mission of discovery and exploration, and as a team we feel there are many more exciting discoveries ahead of us in the months and years to come.”

From the sample of the Red Planet, drilled by Curiosity from a piece of sedimentary rock near an ancient stream bed in Gale Crater, the NASA team was able to detect the presence of sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon. According to NASA, these are a few key chemical ingredients for life – making it possible that living microbes could have existed on Mars.

“A fundamental question for this mission is whether Mars could have supported a habitable environment,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “From what we know now, the answer is yes.”

Using Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) and Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instruments, the sample indicates that the Yellowknife Bay area the rover is exploring was the end of an ancient river system or an intermittently wet lake bed that could have provided chemical energy and other favorable conditions for microbes.

In a surprise for the researchers, the sample of rock consists of a fine grain mudstone containing clay minerals, sulfate minerals and other chemicals which, unlike many other Mars samples, were less oxidized, acidic or salty. This find indicates that there would have been an energy gradient of the sort many microbes on Earth exploit to live.

“The range of chemical ingredients we have identified in the sample is impressive, and it suggests pairings such as sulfates and sulfides that indicate a possible chemical energy source for micro-organisms,” said Paul Mahaffy, principal investigator of the SAM suite of instruments at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Additional information about the Curiosity mission and it’s continued exploration and search for microbial live in the Gale Crater is available at the mission web site: http://www.nasa.gov/msl