A large group of scientists, including astrobiologists at the University of Florida, geophysicists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a few scientists in France and Mexico, and many others, are a winner of the 2026 Gizmodo Science Fair.
The team discovered a set of seven organic molecules crucial to carbon-based life preserved within clay deposits that NASA’s Curiosity rover had sampled from the dried remains of an over 3.5-billion-year-old lakebed inside Gale Crater on Mars.
Among these molecules, a sulfur-bearing chemical, benzothiophene, had previously been detected within the cosmically ancient Murchison meteorite—a historic space rock more than 4 billion years old that’s analogous to the kinds of meteorites very likely responsible for seeding the earliest building blocks of life here on Earth.
The team behind this portion of NASA’s multifaceted Curiosity mission took a strategic step back from the weightier, big-ticket questions, like “Is there life on Mars?” or even “Did life ever exist on Mars?” Ultimately, the team chased down a more fundamental question: “Has Mars ever been conducive to the generation of the kinds of basic molecular compounds that are required to sustain carbon-based life, at least as we know it, here on Earth?”
Geophysicist and planetary scientist Ashwin Vasavada—who leads NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission team for Curiosity from his post at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California—framed it another way in his 2022 mission overview. NASA’s MSL team, he wrote, seeks to discover whether or not Mars ever had “potentially habitable ancient environments.”
The subset of NASA’s MSL team that remotely operates its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument onboard Curiosity discovered seven diverse organic molecules preserved in clay, where they were likely bonded to that clay, just under the subsurface of Gale Crater. Those carbon-based molecules were trimethylbenzene, tetramethylbenzene, methyl benzoate (AKA, benzoic acid methyl ester), dihydronaphthalene, naphthalene, benzothiophene, and methylnaphthalene.
The discovery of these compounds confirmed two things, according to Amy Williams, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Florida who led this study for NASA’s SAM instrument team.
First, it showed that the infamous lack of a decent magnetosphere needed to protect Mars from solar radiation and other cosmic rays was not so bad that these organic compounds couldn’t remain relatively intact a small distance beneath the Martian surface. Second—by dint of how the SAM instrument performs its chemical tests from its compartments inside Curiosity—these discoveries imply that several of the seven organic compounds were chemical byproducts broken off of bigger and even more complex organic molecules preserved in the Martian clay.
“A lot of folks are like, ‘Oh, complex organic carbon! That must be life!’” Williams told Gizmodo. “Unfortunately, for life-detection studies, you can get that kind of thing forming abiotically on meteorites. It just depends on what the type of macromolecular carbon is.”
In other words, the most cautious working hypothesis is that what Williams and the SAM team call the compounds’ “indigenous macromolecular source”—the larger, life-relevant molecules they came from—originated in a meteoroid early in the solar system’s history. It would have been just one among many that have buried themselves into the Martian dirt across the planet’s 4.5-billion-year lifetime.
To put it mildly, the implications, while not exactly evidence of Topps trading card Martians, are exceedingly promising. The SAM team’s find implies that ancient Mars was, at a minimum, bombarded with the same kinds of carbon-rich meteorites that almost assuredly seeded complex organic molecules on our own ancient Earth. And, even better, Mars has now proven itself capable of retaining these essential building blocks for life under its soil across billions of years. That’s great news for aspiring Martian explorers of all tax brackets.
“At least some subset of the molecules that we saw are very consistent with what we see from carbonaceous chondrites and [other] meteorites,” Williams told Gizmodo.
But there’s still hope that Gale Crater’s as-yet-unknown and more complex organic carbons might be something that really was created by alien life indigenous to Mars.
Curiosity’s SAM instrument is, in brief, a first-of-its-kind, remotely operated, rugged, and interplanetary wet chemistry lab. It crams a bench top’s worth of lab-grade scientific testing equipment into a spacefaring device about the size of a 1970s microwave. To analyze the chemical make-up of its test samples, SAM’s Flight Model gas chromatograph-mass spectrometry (GC/MS) tool is, by necessity, a hands-free device that breaks down the complex compounds unearthed by the Curiosity rover into smaller, more gaseous, and more easily testable organic compounds.
“Some people may be disappointed, ‘Oh, you can’t say that you found this more complex molecule or that more complex thing,’” Williams explained to Gizmodo. “And that’s okay in this study, I think, because what we’ve demonstrated is that there is more complex organic matter [on Mars]. We broke it apart with the experiment.”
A crucial thing to understand about the SAM team’s discovery this year is that it’s over two decades in the making—a success born of the kind of long-term planning and disciplined continuity of capabilities that only big institutions like NASA would probably even bother attempting. The concept of developing a miniature automated chemistry lab under the SAM acronym, in fact, dates at least as far back as 2004, when the idea was first laid out at the 35th Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) Scientific Assembly, cohosted by the European Space Agency in Paris.
Back when William Brinckerhoff, then an applied physics researcher at Johns Hopkins, co-authored these early SAM proposals, the goal of hunting for Martian organics had emerged in direct response to these molecules’ eerie absence during NASA’s Viking missions in the late 1970s.
“With Viking, we really didn’t see anything. We saw maybe two molecules—and it took a lot of reinterpretation to say why we were missing the organics there,” Williams explained.
The Viking mission had conducted its own GC/MS experiment, which, as Brinckerhoff and his colleagues put it in their preliminary study into SAM’s feasibility, might have “destroyed” otherwise detectable Martian amino acids via heating during that process. Vikings’ system was also not sensitive enough to detect modest traces of other organic compounds like amines.
“Furthermore, Viking sampled only the first centimeters in depth of the Martian ground, where the organic material has been oxidized/destroyed by atmospheric H2O2 [i.e., the bleaching agent, hydrogen peroxide …] or by atomic oxygen,” Brinckerhoff and his coauthors wrote.
But “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” as everyone from space science luminary Carl Sagan to fictional FBI agent Fox Mulder has said about the search for extraterrestrial life. Good science means that, when your Viking space probe doesn’t find any interesting carbon molecules after scraping down only a few centimeters into the Martian dirt—then you just gotta send out another probe that can dig deeper.
In short, this was hard. It is self-evidently an important and valuable contribution to our understanding of the potential for life beyond Earth, but when giving out an award, sometimes, special dispensations should be granted when the achievement itself was just so very, very hard. Beyond that, it has also been clearly a long and winding road. Brinckerhoff, for example, is still a co-investigator on SAM now, 22 years later, in his current role at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“Folks built this instrument [SAM] when I was still in college,” Williams, who is now a mom, told Gizmodo. “And now I had the opportunity to help lead one of these experiments, and now my grad students are working with those data to try to further our interpretations of what we see in the noise of this experiment. So, it’s a generational thing for sure.”
There were unexpected setbacks too. NASA’s Curiosity rover had been designed, among other things, to drill boreholes into the Gale Crater’s lakebed for the extraction of deep samples—but, on December 1, 2016, its drill’s retractable motor got stuck.
“Just before we climbed over a ridge and we’re about to drop into this clay-bearing unit for the first time, this motor stops working,” MSL’s team lead at NASA JPL, Ashwin Vasavada, told Gizmodo. “And, if we had never got it to move, we would have never drilled again in the whole mission […] We would never have had [the] new paper.”
What followed was about a year’s worth of high-stakes drama, Apollo 13 meets Wall-E, as Vasavada and his team of scientists and engineers remotely troubleshooted their scrappy, six-wheeled Mars robot. “We kinda coaxed the motor to move, in its half-broken state, to where it was sticking out beyond the prongs,” Vasavada recalled.
“We had to basically teach the rover all over again how to drill rocks,” he told Gizmodo. “We had to learn ourselves, using our test bed on Earth. Then we had to code up new flight software to teach the rover.”
While Curiosity’s SAM wet chemistry lab had dozens of little Keurig-like travel cups of chemical reagent with which to dissolve clay samples for its GC/MS molecular testing, it only had two cups of the more unique reagent needed for this study, tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH). And, by the time the team had landed on the right spot to drill for this fateful testing, the year was 2020—a time when, as you may recall, the world was in a pandemic lockdown over a novel coronavirus.
“Our entire JPL team, in about a week, learned how to do everything we used to do in a room together here […] with all of our fancy monitors and equipment […] from our laptops and monitors in our living rooms,” Vasavada said.
Beyond more roving science experiments around Gale Crater for Curiosity and more analysis of the data it collects back here on Earth, the team’s success has inspired a next-generation version of its SAM instrument, called the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer. This new remote wet chemistry lab will launch with the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin Mars rover in 2028. And another similar instrument is scheduled to venture to Saturn’s moon Titan onboard NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft that same year.
Team members included Amy J. Williams, from the University of Florida’s Department of Geological Sciences; Ashwin R. Vasavada, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who now serves as the project scientist for NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory; the dearly departed NASA astrobiologist Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez (1959-2021) with the National Autonomous University of Mexico; analytical chemist Caroline Freissinet with the Laboratory for Atmospheres, Observations, and Space (LATMOS) in France; astrobiologist Jennifer L. Eigenbrode; and countless other scientists at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, as well as many, many, more dedicated researchers who share in this achievement.
Click here to see all of the winners of the 2026 Gizmodo Science Fair.
Source: Gizmodo