NASA finds new form of 'building blocks of life' on Mars?

A new technique performed by Martian warrior Curiostiy has helped uncover traces of previously unknown building blocks of life on this mysterious planet.

According to NASA, it was a very accidental discovery. Curiousity , a rover that's been "out of service" for many years but still runs well, has continued its journey with extensive missions, including sampling rocks at the foot of Mars' Sharp mountain . However its drill suddenly stopped working.

Instead of pausing the whole old machine to wait to change gears, NASA scientists decided to give Curiosity another task: instead of drilling rock and grinding it into powder, it shod some sand on nearby Ogunquit Shoal. there to put into the "wet chemistry laboratory" integrated inside the "body" , consisting of 9 solvent cups.

Curiosity, a rover launched by NASA to Mars in 2011, landed in 2012 and is still running well until now - Photo: NASA

According to Science Alert, the team didn't expect much of anything new, because they believe it's hard for sand to store organic molecules - the main search target of Curiosity when it was launched to Mars in 2011. They simply let it do something while waiting to troubleshoot the drill.

But when the chemicals broke through the outermost layer of the sand, they identified signs of many organic substances such as ammonia and benzoic acid , and also many forms of organic compounds that had never been found before. on Mars.

The incident happened in 2016, and was initially thought to be of little importance because it was not yet direct evidence of life. But after a period of evaluation, recently NASA scientists decided to publish because they believe this will open a new direction - another way to search for applicable building blocks of life. for both Curiostiy and the more advanced robots and rovers that came later.

"This experiment expands the catalog of organic molecules found in samples of Martian matter and demonstrates the effectiveness of a powerful new tool for searching for other organic molecules associated with organisms or prebiotic material " - Maeva Millan biologist from the Center Goddard space flight NASA and Georgetown University, who led the research NASA statement.

The study has just been published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy.