NASA’s Curiosity rover has found what it went to Mars to look for: evidence of an environment that could have once supported life.

Chemical analyses show that a greyish powder taken from the rover’s first drilled rock sample contains clay minerals formed in water that was slightly salty, and neither too acidic nor too alkaline for life.

“If this water was around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it,” says Curiosity project scientist John Grotzinger, a planetary geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He and other NASA researchers announced the findings today at a news briefing in Washington DC.

Previous missions to Mars have spotted clay minerals. And Curiosity itself had already found signs that liquid water once flowed across the surface. But the pinch of powder tested by Curiosity, from a rock nicknamed John Klein, is the first hard evidence of water-borne clays in a benign pH environment. “This is the only definitive habitable environment that we’ve described and recorded,” says David Blake, principal investigator for the rover’s Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument (CheMin) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

An X-ray analysis by CheMin showed that the ground-up rock comprised mostly igneous minerals such as feldspar, pyroxene, olivine and magnetite. But at least 20% of the rock was made up of clay minerals, such as smectite, that form in the presence of water. The salts in the rock, such as halite, are of the sort that life tolerates, Blake says, unlike the iron salts found elsewhere on Mars by the rover Opportunity, which indicate an acidic environment.

A second instrument on Curiosity, known as the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), heated a fraction of a gram of powder and analyzed the gases released. Water was released from the sample at relatively high temperatures, which is characteristic of clay minerals and a good confirmation of CheMin’s findings, says Paul Mahaffy, principal investigator for SAM at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The discovery means that the six-wheeled Curiosity rover will linger longer at the bottom of Gale Crater, Grotzinger says. Engineers are now troubleshooting a memory glitch that caused Curiosity’s main computer to switch to a backup on 28 February. Earlier recovery efforts were delayed when mission managers shut the rover down, to protect against a solar radiation storm that washed over Mars earlier this month.

Science operations are expected to resume within a few days but will halt again in April, when Mars moves behind the Sun as seen from Earth. After communications resume, Grotzinger says, Curiosity will try drilling into John Klein again before packing up and starting the 10-kilometer drive to its ultimate destination, a 5-kilometer-tall peak known as Aeolis Mons.

This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on March 12, 2013.

6 Comments

1. 1. manojg 08:55 PM 3/13/13

   Next to find fossils.

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2. 2. The Ethical Skeptic 02:20 AM 3/14/13

   Outstanding! First drill too. Thoroughly fascinating and a job well done by the NASA engineers. Hopefully this gets better and better as the plan unfolds.

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3. 3. bgrnathan 10:19 AM 3/15/13

   HAVING THE RIGHT CONDITIONS TO SUSTAIN LIFE doesn't mean that life can originate by chance or from non-living matter. Please read my popular Internet articles listed below:
   
   SCIENCE AND THE ORIGIN OF LIFE, NATURAL LIMITS OF EVOLUTION, HOW FORENSIC SCIENCE REFUTES ATHEISM, WAR AMONG EVOLUTIONISTS (2nd Edition), DOES GOD PARTICLE EXPLAIN UNIVERSE'S ORIGIN? ANY LIFE ON MARS CAME FROM EARTH, NO HALF-EVOLVED DINOSAURS
   
   Visit my newest Internet site: THE SCIENCE SUPPORTING CREATION
   
   Sincerely,
   Babu G. Ranganathan*
   (B.A. theology/biology)
   
   Author of popular Internet article, TRADITIONAL DOCTRINE OF HELL EVOLVED FROM GREEK ROOTS
   
   * I have had the privilege of being recognized in the 24th edition of Marquis "Who's Who In The East" for my writings on religion and science, and I have given successful lectures (with question and answer time afterwards) defending creation from science before evolutionist science faculty and students at various colleges and universities.

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4. 4. col.kije 02:08 PM 3/21/13

   Good grief bgrnathan.
   
   What are you doing here? Clearly not Scientific and evidently not American.

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5. 5. karl 10:44 PM 3/21/13

   just out of curiosity,I'd love to know the composition and salts of the water those clays formed (as to make a mineral water equivalent here call it Curiosity reserve)
   
   

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6. 6. pl02vectra 07:10 PM 3/26/13

   The Curiosity Mission is a brillant undertaking, using the very best of Science and Engineerig. A lot of U.S. bucks have been spent trying to find out if there was, or was not, Life on Mars. Taking a backward step from the glitz and razamatazz, is it cost effective? Before I get invited to "a neck tie party" just think about these few points I am making.
   We know that Mars is a Geologically Dead, it has not an active Core.
   It has not got a Magnetosphere, which, on Earth, protects us from The Suns Radiation, and anything else that the Sun can hurl at us!
   But, most of all, it has not a substantial orbiting Moon, as we have.
   The Moon, apart from controling tides in The Worlds Oceans, gives stability to The Axis that The Earth spins on.
   The rotation of Mars, about is Axis is irregular and unstable because it lacks a substantial orbiting Moon.
   We live on a "Blue Diamond" where everthing is geared too the creation of Life, in all shapes and forms.
   The U.S. is spending a lot of bucks ( £s this side of the pond) trying to find, what! I may have Martian Genes in me! It would have been better if the aims of the mission were focused on the potential habitally of the Martian surface, because, if The Humane population keeps increasing, we will "outgrow" Earth, and the ability of The Earth, to sustain all Life as we now know it.

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