Mars rover carries out chemistry experiment never done beyond Earth

Space Mars rover carries out chemistry experiment never done beyond Earth, discovers more building blocks of life April 21, 2026 / 7:43 AM EDT / CBS/AFP Add CBS News on Google NASA's Curiosity rover has discovered more building blocks of life on Mars after carrying out a chemistry experiment never before conducted on another planet, scientists said Tuesday.The organic molecules are not definitive evidence of past life, the NASA-led team emphasized, because they could also have formed on the red planet or crash-landed on meteorites.But it proves that these important clues to Martian history have been preserved on the surface for more than 3 billion years, they added.Back then, the surface of Mars was thought to have been dotted with huge lakes and rivers full of liquid water, a key ingredient for life as we know it."The ongoing characterization of organic matter on Mars is a pillar of modern robotic exploration, as space agencies send rovers and landers to explore Mars' past and present habitability and to search for signs of life," the authors wrote in the study published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.Curiosity landed in a former lake bed called the Gale crater in 2012, and has been searching for signs of possible past life since.The car-sized rover carried two tubes of a chemical called TMAH, which can break apart organic matter to see what it is made out of. "This experiment's never been run before on another world," Amy Williams, an astrobiologist working on the Curiosity mission, told AFP.The team was under pressure because they only had "two shots to get it right," added Williams, the lead author of a new study describing the results.The experiment, conducted in 2020, detected more than 20 organic molecules, including several that had never before been confirmed on Mars. NASA?s Curiosity Mars rover took this selfie at a location nicknamed "Mary Anning" after a 19th-century English palaeontologist in this image released by the U.S. sp...