NASA's Perseverance Rover Detects Organic Carbon on Martian Surface

NASA's Perseverance rover has been exploring Jezero Crater for five years, searching for chemical evidence of past processes on Mars. Recently, it detected complex macromolecular carbon on the surface of a rock at a site called Bright Angel, located at the edge of an ancient river channel known as Neretva Vallis. Ashley E. Murphy, a researcher at the Planetary Institute in Tucson, Arizona, stated that this is the shallowest detection of organic matter on the Martian surface to date. While the presence of such carbon on Earth typically indicates a biological origin, further analysis is needed to determine its source, which may require returning samples to Earth. The detection was made using SHERLOC, a UV Raman spectrometer on Perseverance's robotic arm, which identifies specific molecular bonds by analyzing light reflected from a target.