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After spending 1,909 Martian sols on the Red Planet, NASA’s Curiosity rover was suffering from a slight malfunction.
The robot’s drill stopped working while Curiosity was on Mars’ Vera Rubin ridge at the base of Mount Sharp. The rover had collected a sample of Martian dirt, and the team behind the mission decided to go a different route.
Instead of dropping the sample into one of the cups in the sample carousel, they dropped it into a cup pre-filled with a chemical mixture. The molecules released from the cup were then trapped and analyzed, revealing organic molecules on Mars that no space agency had previously detected.
The scientists detailed their discovery in a study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Maëva Millan, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center and lead author of the new study, explains that the initial motivation behind the experiment was to have a reference for future chemistry experiments conducted on Mars samples.
“This experiment was definitely successful,” Millan tells Inverse. “While we haven’t found what we were looking for, biosignatures, we showed that this technique is really promising.”
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The Curiosity rover was recently joined by NASA’s Perseverance rover which landed on Mars on February 18.NASA
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