Life on Mars? NASA Discovery Gives Hope to The Idea (Video)

NASA announced the Curiosity Rover found “organic matter” on Mars.

If you’re holding out hope that Mars may have once been an inhabited world, two new studies should put a little spring in your step.

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has identified a variety of organic molecules, the carbon-based building blocks of life as we know it, in 3.5-billion-year-old Red Planet rocks, one of the papers reports.

“These results do not give us any evidence of life,” stressed study lead author Jennifer Eigenbrode, a scientist at the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. [The Search for Life on Mars: A Photo Timeline]

“But there is a possibility that [the organics] are from an ancient life source; we just don’t know,” Eigenbrode told Space.com. “And even if life was never around, they [the molecules] tell us there was at least something around for organisms to eat.”