Curiosity is looking for signs that Mars is or was once habitable (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Editorial: “We need a piece of Mars to continue search for life“
REPORTERS and camera crew made sure they got to the conference centre in San Francisco early on 3 December 2012. They were expecting historic news from Mars. Speculation was rife: what exactly had NASA’s newest and biggest rover found? Curiosity’s project scientist John Grotzinger had let slip his excitement in a radio interview two weeks earlier. He was explaining how the rover had analysed its first scoops of Martian soil from a pile of windswept sand, then added: “This data is going to be one for the history books. It’s looking really good.”
That could only mean one thing, right? Signs of life! Now Grotzinger and others faced a packed pressroom at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union to announce… almost nothing. Yes, Curiosity had technically detected organic molecules, a prerequisite for life on the Red Planet. But no, the science team emphasised, this was not significant – the organics were probably from Earth and this was just a successful first test that showed Curiosity’s instruments were working properly. To those who had devoted nearly a decade of work to this project, this was exciting news. But it was hardly the earth-shaking headline that the reporters had been expecting.
Fast forward several weeks, however, and Curiosity’s first soil sample turns out to be a big deal after all. It changes our ideas about the Martian surface. And it adds yet another twist in the decades-long quest to find signs of past, or…
