She told the New Scientist: "We have proved that this experiment can work. Georgetown University researcher Maëva Millan is the lead author of the study describing the SAM results. Unfortunately, what the team didn't find was any evidence of life, such as amino acids or other complex organic molecules. This helps verify that such experimentation could be a valuable tool in the search for life on the surface of alien worlds. They found organic molecules that would have been missed in the rover's normal sample analysis. The researchers involved in the study spent several years analyzing the results of this wet chemistry experiment conducted by SAM. The new results related to a test in December 2017, which used these solvents to dissolve substances to search for organic molecules. Among these is a mass spectrometer that is designed to isolate and identify the key elements necessary for life.Īdditionally, SAM has a wheel of 74 storage holders, some of which contain chemical solvents that allow the rover to conduct so-called "wet chemistry," and others that are made of quartz, allowing Curiosity to bake samples. These samples were transferred to SAM, which is made up of three different instruments. SAM was recently used to analyse Martian samples to search for organic molecules that may have originated from life. This has included the search for organic compounds made up of elements like carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.įrom there, SAM is used to investigate the origins of these organic molecules to see if they are abiotic-not derived from living organisms-or if they could be biotic in origin, produced by the processes that sustain life.Īnother possible origin for organic molecules would be prebiotic, these being the kind of molecules that we believe could have led to the development of life on Earth.Īn image of the Curiosity Rover shows the location of the SAM instrument. Since its arrival on Mars in 2012, the SUV-sized Curiosity Rover has been exploring the nature and extent of ancient habitable environments in Gale Crater. The results from the first SAM tests are detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy. While the experiment conducted with the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument has so far failed to deliver any signs of life on the Red Planet, it proves the technique's viability for future missions, possibly on worlds more distant than Mars, such as Saturn's moon Titan. NASA's Curiosity Rover has tested a new technique to search for molecules that could reveal the signs of alien life on Mars.
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