Organic matter found on Mars, opening new chapter in search for life

The Curiosity rover landed on Mars in 2012 with a detective’s mission: to find clues about whether or not life could exist on the Red Planet. On the top of scientists’ wish list was evidence of organic matter, which emerged in 2013. But the organic molecules identified by the car-sized rover then were too few and ambiguous. So mission scientists sent Curiosity on a four-mile journey to the base of Mount Sharp in hopes of finding more conclusive evidence buried in old lake sediments.

And that did the trick. Mission scientists announced today in a paper published in the journal Science that Curiosity discovered a whole catalogue of preserved organic matter in the first rock layers that the rover checked there.

“We have just satisfied a mission objective for Curiosity,” says Jennifer Eigenbrode, study