Perseverance strikes again with an intriguing — yet unresolved — clue in the search for past life on Mars.
In an ancient river channel, the rover detected complex organic carbon within and on rocks, planetary scientist Ashley Murphy and colleagues report June 24 in Science Advances. One of those detections is the first of their kind to be found on a rock the rover hadn’t drilled into. Combined with previous data from Perseverance, the finding adds context to a potential signature of long-ago microbial processes on Mars, says Murphy, of the Planetary Science Institute headquartered in Tucson, Ariz.
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