Since liquid water is essential for life as we know it now, scientists believe that life on Mars, if it ever existed, could have been maintained from key components such as organic carbon if it existed in sufficient quantities such as organic carbon. if present in sufficient quantities. Organic carbon is carbon attached to a hydrogen atom. It is the basis of organic molecules, which are created and used by all known life forms. However, the presence of organic carbon on Mars will not prove the existence of life there. These can also come from non-living sources such as meteorites and volcanoes. Organic carbon has been found on Mars in the past. But previous measurements produced information only for specific compounds or had captured only part of the carbon in the rocks. The new measurement gives the total amount of organic carbon in these rocks. The Curiosity rover drilled samples of 3.5 billion-year-old mudstones into the Yellowknife Bay of Gale Crater, the site of an ancient lake on Mars. The mudstone in the crater formed as a very fine sediment in the water that settled at the bottom of the lake and was buried. Organic carbon was part of this material and was incorporated into the mudstone. Gale Crater had other life-threatening conditions besides liquid water and organic carbon, such as chemical energy sources, low acidity and other elements necessary for biology such as oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur. According to the scientists involved in the research, the site “would offer a habitable environment for life, if it ever existed”. To carry out the measurement, Curiosity delivered the sample to the Mars Sample Analyzer (SAM), where an oven heated the pulverized rock to progressively higher temperatures. It used oxygen and heat to convert organic carbon to carbon dioxide. The amount of carbon dioxide was then measured to obtain the amount of organic carbon in the rock. The experiment took place in 2014 but it took years of analysis to understand the data and put the results into the other discoveries of the Gale crater mission. As it was a resource-intensive experiment, it was only performed once during the 10 years of Curiosity on Mars.
