MOSCOW, December 4 (RIA Novosti) - NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has employed its full set of tools to analyze Martian soil and discovered water, sulfur and chlorine-containing substances, as well as other ingredients, within it, NASA reported on Monday.
The soil sample that was studied came from a drift of windblown dust and sand called "Rocknest." It was taken from a relatively flat part of Gale Crater still miles away from Curiosity’s main destination point on the slope of Mount Sharp.
The Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) suite and the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument are part of the rover's laboratory.
“We have no definitive detection of Martian organics at this point, but we will keep looking in the diverse environments of Gale Crater,” NASA quoted SAM Principal Investigator Paul Mahaffy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., as saying.
During the rover's two-year mission, researchers will use its 10 science instruments to assess if the selected field site inside Gale Crater has ever had environmental conditions suitable for microbial life.
