Will NASA's Mars rover find signs of life? A Q&A with a Curiosity astrobiologist.

The Viking missions, which successfully put two landers on the Martian surface in 1976, both had GCMS instruments, but they didn't have this wet chemistry capability. Compounds like amino acids and nucleobases, the fundamental building blocks of life, would not have been detectable by the Viking instrument. This is really the first robust search for these compounds on Mars. 

How could your work help to answer astrobiology questions?

Glavin: The goal of this mission is to assess the habitability potential of an environment on Mars. We're at the bottom of Gale Crater, and we're trying to determine whether or not that was or currently is a habitable environment. [Gale Crater Explained (Infographic)]

Of course, there are a lot of signs that point to that being the case — otherwise we wouldn't have gone there. There was clearly water present at one time inside that crater; we see that evidence from orbit with the layers of clay minerals at the base of Mount Sharp inside the crater. 

What I'm working on specifically, with respect to the Sample Analysis at Mars experiment, or SAM, is the ability to detect organic compounds in these materials. I think that's sort of the second step toward assessing habitability. The first is, was there water there — liquid water — available for prebiotic chemistry and possibly life?

The second thing is, are there the basic elements of life — carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulfur — and are there reduced forms of carbon, particularly organics? That's one of the key pieces of information that's currently been missing from Mars. We don't really have a good answer to that question yet. I'm hopeful that SAM will help us to understand whether or not organic compounds are present on Mars or not.

I think the discovery of organic compounds on Mars would be a big step for astrobiology. Whether or not those organic compounds came from life that was there at some point, or were delivered from space, finding organic compounds on the surface is important because it says the environment isn't so harsh that it's destroying them, that organic compounds can be preserved in some environments on the surface of Mars. I think that will certainly be one of the key questions that we're going to try to answer during this mission.

This story was provided by Astrobiology Magazine, a web-based publication sponsored by the NASA astrobiology program.

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