Samples of Martian rock taken last month by NASA's Curiosity robot contain sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon – some of the chemical ingredients essential for the formation of living things.
"One of the fundamental objectives of this mission is to find out if there was ever a habitable environment on Mars ," explained Michael Meyer, scientist in charge of the Martian Exploration Program of the US space agency. "From what we know now, the answer would be yes," he adds.
The chemical elements were detected by the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) and Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instruments and indicate that Yellowknife Bay, where the Martian vehicle currently operates, was either the end of an ancient river system or a lake intermittently humid that could have provided chemical energy and other favorable conditions for the growth of microbes around 3 billion years ago. In addition, the researchers have concluded that the water that helped form the sedimentary rocks in the area, rich in clay and sulfates, had a relatively neutral pH, and was neither overly salty nor overly oxidizing.
"We have found a livable environment, so benign and so conducive to life that, probably, if you had been there and had this water on hand, you would have been able to drink it," said John Grotzinger, a researcher at the California Institute. of Technology (Caltech).
