Business · Ars Technica
The material caught on Martian rocks, Murphy’s team cautions, might have originated from non-biological processes as well
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A result like this usually invites two major questions, and the team immediately got busy trying to answer them.
Key facts
- Between sols 1180 and 1218, the rover pointed this UV laser at four targets at Bright Angel
- The remaining three (called Cheyava Falls, Apollo Temple, and Walhalla Glades) returned a spectroscopic signature of macromolecular carbon
- The detection of Bright Angel carbon came from SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals), a UV Raman spectrometer fitted on Perseverance’s
- To characterize the new mode, Kyle Uckert, SHERLOC’s deputy principal investigator at NASA’s JPL, and his colleagues collected spectra from spare flight optics in their own lab
Summary
NASA’s Perseverance rover has spent five years traversing Jezero Crater looking for the chemical leftovers of whatever processes were at work on Mars billions of years ago. “To our knowledge, that’s the shallowest detection of organic matter on Martian surface to date,” said Ashley E. The detection of Bright Angel carbon came from SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals), a UV Raman spectrometer fitted on Perseverance’s robotic arm. Between sols 1180 and 1218, the rover pointed this UV laser at four targets at Bright Angel. At least within the precision limits of the Perseverance’s instruments, the material roughly matches terrestrial kerogen. On Earth, kerogen is made almost exclusively of biological matter, mainly fossilized microbes that were buried millions of years ago.