Answering Curiosity Questions On Mars

NASA’s Curiosity rover has spent the past year studying several geochemically complex areas on the surface of Mars. Curiosity carries the most sophisticated suite of analytical instruments ever deployed to an extraterrestrial destination. The rover drilled into rocks, ground up samples, and processed the samples in ovens and in mass and X-ray spectrometers. International teams of dozens of scientists have now had a chance to analyze the data and assemble a collection of reports detailing the findings (Science 2013, DOI: 10.1126/science.1244258). Curiosity had previously hinted that ancient Mars had a watery, moderate pH environment that would have been hospitable to organisms (C&EN, March 18, page 7). The myriad new results include detection of alkaline and fractionated magma, which were never before seen on Mars but are profoundly similar to Earth’s igneous rocks. Heated samples of Mars’s crust released volatile compounds such as carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, water, and oxygen, which scientists suggest could have been incorporated from the planet’s atmosphere. The data from this examination, the scientists say, give an unprecedented understanding of the nature of Earth’s planetary neighbor.