Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2023

5 ASTRO PUBLISHING cules as far back as 2013 (with the caveat that the chemical analysis method used to determine the pres- ence of carbon may have also been responsible for the addition of chlo- rine from the prevalent surface per- chlorate material onto those organic molecules – but carbon was defi- nitely detected). This Wildcat Ridge discovery is, itself, the second major news announcement from Persever- ance concerning the detection of or- ganics on Mars, the first having been reported at an American Geophysi- cal Union conference back in late 2021. Upon reconsideration of the experiments, it is arguable that the NASA Viking Landers also detected trace organic material on the ground back in 1976. If the reports from Mars had been “no detectable organic molecules anywhere,” that would have been the much more surprising story, as then scientists would have had to come up with scenarios describing why an element (carbon) was not present on such a large, rocky body so close to a planet where carbon made possible the evolution of life and the development of the scien- tists who now exist to perform such measurements! Organic molecules are, simply, mol- ecules containing carbon atoms. Just as saying “I can read” does not, by itself, provide much information about what languages you can read, T he first definitive detection of Martian organic chemicals in material on the surface of Mars came from analysis by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover of sample powder from this mudstone target, “Cumberland.” [NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS] the descriptor “organic” spans the gigantic chemical space of molecules vital to life, molecules capable of de- stroying life both slowly (carcino- gens) or quickly (TNT or RDX), laboratory molecules synthesized with no direct connection to life at all, and all other carbon-containing molecules. So long as one or more carbon atoms are connected to ei- ther other carbon atoms or any other atoms in the Periodic Table by the strong chemical bonds referred to as covalent bonds , they qualify. This includes the simple molecule methane (containing one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms − CH 4 ), the amino and nucleic acids that make up your proteins and DNA, interstellar polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and carbon- containing molecules of all sizes in between. The definition of “organic molecule” is even broad enough ac- cording to some scientists that it in- cludes the single diamond crystal