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NASA’s Perseverance rover has spent five years exploring Jezero Crater in search of remnants of chemicals that were active on Mars billions of years ago. The rover has found organic carbon, but most of it has been inside rocks that had to be drilled or cut to reveal it. But now, on the edge of an ancient river called Neretva Vallis, Perseverance found a very complex macromolecular gas sitting on top of the rock.
“To our knowledge, it is the deepest detection of life on the Martian surface to date,” said Ashley E. Murphy, a researcher at the Planetary Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and lead author of the study of the rock, which was found at Bright Angel. On Earth, the abundance of macromolecular carbon often indicates a natural origin. But to learn what the Burning Angel’s carbon is and where it came from, we may need to bring samples back to Earth.
Air on the rocks
Bright Angel’s carbon detection came from SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals), a UV Raman spectrometer mounted on Perseverance’s robotic arm. SHERLOC shines a deep ultraviolet laser on a target and reads the light that returns with variable energy, a signal that helps scientists identify specific molecules.
