Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2023

4 ASTRO PUBLISHING by Damian G. Allis NASA Solar System Ambassador The definitive discovery of organics on Mars W e are close to the two-year mark for the NASA Mars 2020 mission exploration of Jezero Crater, home of an ancient lake fed, in some small or large part, by an ancient river. The dry remains of this river, a delta replete with the kinds of clay deposits that are known to form slowly and only in water here on Earth, are now the focus of sample collection and select chemi- cal analyses by the onboard labora- tory of the Perseverance rover (“Percy” for short). An announce- ment from the NASA Mars website (“NASA’s Perseverance Rover Investi- N ASA’s Perseverance Mars rover looks out at an expanse of boul- ders on the landscape in front of a location nicknamed “Santa Cruz” on Feb. 16, 2022, the 353 rd Martian day, or sol, of the mission. This panorama is made up of 24 individual images from the rover’s Mastcam-Z camera system, stitched together after they were sent back from Mars. The tonality of the image has been en- hanced to make the landscape more similar to the Earth’s environment, making it easier for the science team to interpret surface features. [NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS] gates Geologically Rich Mars Ter- rain,” from September 15 th ) reports the detection of organic molecules within clay samples taken from “Wildcat Ridge,” a large and acces- sible representative of the sedimen- tary rocks that are abundant in the delta. This new detection of surface organ- ics at Wildcat Ridge by no means marks the first detection of Martian organics. The Curiosity rover had di- rectly detected benzoic acid back in 2021, benzene, toluene, and short- chain organic molecules back in 2018, and chlorinated organic mole-