Researchers poring over imagery and data from the Perseverance rover on Mars have found evidence of organic molecules in the planet’s Jezero Crater, potentially providing evidence of the planet’s carbon cycles and its ability to host life.

The discovery is by no means a confirmation that life once existed on Mars, but it is a sign that the conditions necessary for life as we know it once did. Perseverance is investigating many aspects of the fourth planet from the Sun, but chief among them is whether or not Mars hosted life in its ancient past.

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The researchers found signals of organic molecules in all ten of the targets Perseverance scrutinized with its SHERLOC instrument (that’s short for the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals instrument). The team’s recent research describing the organic-mineral associations around Jezero was published today in Nature.

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