Nasa rover finds ancient organic matter on Mars

NASA’S Curiosity rover has discovered organic matter on Mars, the agency announced last night.

The complex organic matter was found buried and preserved in ancient, three-billion-year-old sediments, suggesting that the planet could have once been home to life.

“With these new findings, Mars is telling us to stay the course and keep searching for evidence of life,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, an associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at Nasa Headquarters, in Washington DC. “I’m confident that our ongoing and planned missions will unlock even more breathtaking discoveries on the Red Planet.”

Findings from Curiosity also reveal that a water lake inside Mars’s Gale crater once held all the “ingredients necessary for life”, including “chemical building blocks and energy sources”.

Curiosity, which landed on Mars in August 2012, drilled 5cm into sedimentary rock called mudstone that formed about three billion years ago in what was then a large lake in Gale crater.

It analysed the samples in its onboard laboratory and found a variety of organic molecules, including some similar to components of kerogen – a fossil-fuel building block found in oil shale and coal-bearing rocks on Earth.

Jen Eigenbrode of Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who led the drilling project, said: “Curiosity has not determined the source of the organic molecules.”

Details of the findings will be published in the journal Science.