The Curiosity Rover has been scouring Gale Crater since it arrived on the Red Planet in 2012. Gale Crater almost certainly contained liquid water at one time in its history, and NASA sent Curiosity into the crater to look for signs of the chemical building blocks of life.
Previous experiments hadn't yielded any positive results. So NASA decided to try something new. They "altered the parameters of the experiment," as scientists might describe it. This is done to test different scenarios, improve accuracy, or see how variables interact.
In other words, scientists asked different questions about the same topic that had previously been explored. In this instance, they came up with a different answer.
"NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has found a diverse mix of organic molecules on Mars, including chemicals widely considered building blocks for the origin of life on Earth," reports Space.com.
NASA directed Curiosity’s instrument array, called the Sample Analysis on Mars (SAM), to collect a sample of clay minerals inside the crater in 2020. Curiosity has a unique digging tool and an onboard lab to analyze soil samples.
NASA scientists examined the samples and, over the last several years, debated the findings. What exactly were the scientists looking at?
They could have been looking at the chemical reaction from the mixing of non-organic geologic processes. This sort of thing has fooled other probes, including the Viking landers that first examined Martian soil in 1976 (some scientists still think the Viking tests prove life existed on Mars billions of years ago).
The results from Curiosity's experiment, published in Nature Communications, are one more step on the road to confirming the existence of life beyond Earth. It's not definitive. Perhaps it never will be unless or until we go up there and look for ourselves.
After breaking down the samples, the team identified over 20 notable chemicals, including the first instances of a nitrogen-containing molecule whose structure resembles proto-DNA. Curiosity also flagged benzothiophene, a sulphurous compound that often hitches a ride on meteorites.
“The same stuff that rained down on Mars from meteorites is what rained down on Earth, and it probably provided the building blocks for life as we know it on our planet,” said Curiosity geological scientist and study co-author Amy WIlliams.
According to Williams, researchers are now certain that large, complex organic molecules can remain preserved in the shallow subsurface layers of Mars. Without in-person examinations on the Red Planet, it remains unclear if these compounds came from past lifeforms, from a meteorite crashing into the planet, or through geological processes. While it is certainly not life itself, these compounds may help reveal organisms that existed on Mars billions of years ago.
It's likely that in order to find life of any kind beyond Earth, we're going to have to "alter the parameters of the experiment." We have many ongoing experiments seeking out life "as we know it." The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is zeroing in on stars with known planetary systems and is looking for chemical signatures of oxygen, carbon, and other elements common to Earth. Under the SETI Institute, the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is currently observing a targeted set of star systems for radio technosignatures. In 2026, a new partnership with NVIDIA introduced real-time AI data processing to help filter out human-made interference from potential alien signals.
These experiments are all looking for life "as we know it." In truth, we can't imagine other life forms that aren't carbon-based. What if they're based on silicon or some other more exotic element? How would we detect that kind of life? What instruments might we use?
What questions can we ask to find answers about life when our knowledge of what might be out there is so limited?
The only way we'll succeed in this endeavor is to "change the parameters of the experiment" and begin to ask different questions. We still may not find anything, but striving to discover the hidden, the unknown in the universe is a worthy goal for humans to aspire.
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