Two robotic missions reported progress in early July. Using NASA’s Perseverance rover, scientists described the structure of organic carbon found last year in Jezero Crater mudstones, Reuters reports in a story carried by CNA. The study used the rover’s SHERLOC instrument to examine macromolecular carbon in two rocks, Cheyava Falls and Walhalla Glades, and the researchers say it resembles carbon that forms through biological or nonbiological processes on Earth, as well as carbon found in meteorites, the report says.
“This strengthens evidence that ancient Mars had chemical ingredients and environmental conditions that could have supported life, but does not provide proof of life nor does it push the needle any further towards biotic or abiotic origins,” study co-leader Kyle Uckert of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said, according to Reuters. The Planetary Science Institute, describing the paper in Science Advances through its scientist Ashley Murphy, says the carbon sat only microns beneath the Martian surface, the shallowest such detection on Mars, and that only more powerful laboratories on Earth could settle whether life or geology produced it.
Meanwhile, China’s Tianwen-2 spacecraft reached asteroid 2016 HO3, also called Kamoʻoalewa, after a trip of about 400 days and roughly 1 billion kilometers, the China National Space Administration says. The agency says the probe reached a point about 20 kilometers from the asteroid, photographed it from there on July 2, and used its navigation data to shrink the error in the asteroid’s position from the order of 100 kilometers to the kilometer level. SpaceNews describes the asteroid as a small, elongated rocky body. CNSA says the probe will next study the asteroid’s shape, composition and internal structure ahead of sampling.