Has NASA's Curiosity Rover Found Clues to Life's Building Blocks on Mars?

This patch of windblown sand and dust downhill from a cluster of dark rocks is the 'Rocknest' site studied by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity. 

The Rocknest patch is about 8 feet by 16 feet (1.5 meters by 5 meters) and may contain perchlorate salts. Image added April 1, 2013.

CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity just might be the latest in a long line of Mars-exploring robots to discover the building blocks for primitive life on the Red Planet.

The Curiosity rover may have gathered evidence for the presence of perchlorates in Rocknest — a sand patch inside the rover's Gale Crater landing site on the Red Planet, scientists say. If so, it shores up the case that the material may well be globally distributed on Mars.

Not only can perchlorates, which are a class of salts, serve as an energy source for potential Martian microorganisms, they are also a sensitive marker of past climate and can lead to the formation of liquid brines under current conditions on the planet.

The possibility that perchlorates are widespread on Mars was detailed in a March 18 presentation at the 44th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.


Curiosity's possible detection
The possible detection of perchlorates at Curiosity’s Gale crater site was spotlighted by Doug Archer, a scientist with the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. He is focused on the habitability of various Martian environments over time. [The Search for Life on Mars

Archer pointed to the rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite that recently ran four samples from Rocknest. That area was selected as the source of the first samples analyzed because it is representative of both windblown material in the Gale Crater and the planet's globally distributed dust, he said.

"When we heated this up, we saw a large oxygen release at the same time we saw the release of these chlorinated hydrocarbons," Archer said, thus making a strong case for the presence of perchlorate salts in Rocknest's soil.