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NASA’s Curiosity rover has found 7 diverse organic compounds in a lakebed rock in Mars' Gale crater, 5 of which had never previously been detected on the planet (www.reuters.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by Innerworld@lemmy.world to c/astronomy@mander.xyz

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[–] becausechemistry@piefed.social 10 points 3 weeks ago

No internal standard on the instrument (it failed). The linked article says that they found nitrogen-containing heterocycles that are “similar to precursors of DNA” but that’s a pretty big stretch. There’s a lot of stuff in there that they just don’t identify.

I think a lot of this stuff is consistent with what you’d get if a carbon- and nitrogen-containing meteor hit the surface. Definitely not a slam-dunk for life, and not really even close, unfortunately.