--- title: Is There Life on Mars? A New Study Offers Tantalizing Clues description: A new study conducted by the Curiosity rover finds a telltale isotope of carbon that could indicate biology. canonical: https://time.com/6140688/life-on-mars-clues/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-01-20T16:54:42.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:51:46.128Z article:section: Science og:title: Is There Life on Mars? A New Study Offers Tantalizing Clues og:description: A rare find with big implications og:url: https://time.com/6140688/life-on-mars-clues/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt237a514c74b0ccdf/698a21a3db2987eea8267665/Curiosity-rover.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 4841 og:image:height: 2723 og:image:alt: Curiosity rover og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Is There Life on Mars? A New Study Offers Tantalizing Clues twitter:description: A rare find with big implications twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt237a514c74b0ccdf/698a21a3db2987eea8267665/Curiosity-rover.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Is There Life on Mars? A New Study Offers Tantalizing Clues > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Future Proof: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Future Proof is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. Making sense of the climate and energy economy. Future Proof examines the forces transforming energy and climate, and what those changes mean for business, technology, policy and the global economy. 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Future Proof covers climate and energy as an economic and business story rather than only an environmental one. It publishes every Friday and is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who writes Future Proof? Justin Worland, a senior correspondent at TIME and an award-winning climate journalist, writes Future Proof. #### Is Future Proof free? Yes. Future Proof is free at time.com/newsletters. ## Video: 'My Career is Mars and Cars.' TIME's 2021 Person of the Year Elon Musk in Conversation With Editor-in-Chief Edward Felsenthal [Watch (HLS stream): 'My Career is Mars and Cars.' TIME's 2021 Person of the Year Elon Musk in Conversation With Editor-in-Chief Edward Felsenthal](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/5IWSHt29.m3u8) (4:05)  _Published 2021-12-14. For Elon Musk, Monday evening was a family affair. Waving to his mother Maye Musk in the audience, and balancing his toddler X Æ A-Xii (pronounced “X”) on his knee, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO sat down for a Q&A with TIME Editor in Chief Edward Felsenthal. Musk had just been named TIME 2021 Person of the Year, and gathered with TIME editors and members of the TIME 100 community in New York City to discuss his selection._  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Jan 20, 2022 4:54 PM UTC  This low-angle self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the site from which it reached down to drill into a rock target. This low-angle self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the site from which it reached down to drill into a rock target. JPL/NASA  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Jan 20, 2022 4:54 PM UTC Mars is both a wonderful and a terrible place to go looking for life. On the one hand, the planet is a wasteland, where wintertime temperatures plunge to -153º C (-225º F), and the atmosphere—such as it is—is just 1% the density of Earth’s and composed principally of carbon dioxide. On the other hand, the Red Planet wasn’t always such a wreck. For the first billion or so years of its 4.5 billion year life span, it was awash in oceans and seas and protected by a thick blanket of air. Eventually, however, its magnetic field shut down, allowing the solar wind to claw away the atmosphere and the water to vanish into space. But that first billion years offered Mars plenty of time to cook up at least microbial life, some of which may have died and left chemical traces on the surface—or even have retreated underground to continue thriving in deep, warm aquifers. Now, a new study, [announced](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-curiosity-rover-measures-intriguing-carbon-signature-on-mars) by NASA and [published](https://www.pnas.org/content/119/4/e2115651119) on Jan. 18 in the _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_, suggests that some of those lingering surface markers of ancient life may have been found—lying in plain sight, in fact. The new research, led by geoscientist Christopher House of Pennsylvania State University, was based on work conducted by NASA’s [Curiosity rover](https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/home/), which has spent the last nine and a half years in Mars’s Gale Crater, a one-time lake, studying its rocks and surface sediments in search of clues to the planet’s geologic—and biologic—history. In the first part of House’s study, the rover used its on-board drill to collect rock and soil samples at 24 different sites around Gale Crater. The samples were then transferred to a laboratory oven within the body of the rover and heated to about 850º C (1,500º F). A [laser spectrometer](https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/msl/pia19086) then went to work, analyzing the chemistry of the vaporized samples—looking especially for carbon, the elemental backbone of all life as we know it. Plenty of carbon was indeed detected—which was pretty much as expected. The surprise was just which type. Carbon comes in two principal isotopes: carbon-13, with six protons and seven neutrons; and carbon-12, with six protons and six neutrons. Carbon-13 doesn’t play well with biology; its heavier structure makes for tougher molecular bonds that don’t allow for the nimble coupling, decoupling and recombining that make biological processes possible, and that carbon-12 performs so easily. The more carbon-12 you find in a Martian sample, the greater the possibility that you’re looking at an artifact of early life. And Curiosity found plenty of it: Nearly half of the samples the rover studied had significantly higher levels of carbon-12 than scientists typically detect in Martian meteorites or in the Martian atmosphere. --- ### More from TIME --- House and his colleagues posit an intriguing biological explanation for their findings: Ancient Martian microbes growing in and under the soil would have preferentially grabbed the available carbon-12 over carbon-13, metabolizing the isotope and producing methane as a byproduct. The methane would have risen into the atmosphere, where it would have been broken down by ultraviolet light, and the carbon-12 would then have precipitated back down as a dusting on the surface. Adding support to that idea was that the samples were collected in the relative highlands and cliffs of Gale Crater—which would have been above the ancient water level and been particularly exposed to the precipitating carbon-12. “The large carbon-12 amounts observed \[on Mars\] are found on Earth in biological methane or when biological methane is consumed by microbes,” wrote House in an email to TIME. “In some ways, the Martian samples resemble Earth rocks from Australia from 2.7 billion years ago, when our atmosphere was rich in biological methane.” NASA is no less sanguine about the findings—even if cautiously so. “We’re finding things on Mars that are tantalizingly interesting,” said Paul Mahaffy, a recently-retired member of the Curiosity science team, in a statement. “But we would really need more evidence to say we’ve identified life.” Mahaffy’s caution is well-placed, because even House admits there are other, non-biological phenomena that could explain the new findings. For one thing, ultraviolet energy from the sun might have caused changes in the molecular makeup of the Martian atmosphere, producing excess amounts of carbon dioxide and carbon-12, which would then have rained down on the surface just as it would in biological processes. “There are papers that predict that UV could cause this type of fractionation,” said House in a [statement released](https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/newly-discovered-carbon-may-yield-clues-ancient-mars/) by Penn State. “However, we need more experimental results showing this … fractionation so we can rule in or rule out this explanation.” Alternatively, and more dramatically, evidence from meteorites indicates that every 100 million years or so, the solar system passes through an interstellar cloud that is rich in multiple elements, including lighter carbon-12\. In theory, that carbon could have rained down on Mars and could explain the new findings. The problem with that scenario is that the cloud would have led to global cooling that would in turn have resulted in glaciation in Gale Crater—signs of which have not been detected. “We have not seen significant evidence for a glacier at Gale Crater yet,” House says. The Curiosity rover, meantime, will continue its explorations, not only analyzing more of the Martian surface, but also sniffing for methane plumes that are known to be released from beneath the surface of Mars periodically, and checking them for the telltale carbon. That would be something of a gold standard finding—possibly indicating not just ancient, but extant life. “If we were to \[discover a large enough plume\],” House says, “the result might match the carbon on the ancient surface, suggesting that the same microbes still inhabit the subsurface.” Short of that case-closed discovery, House is reserving his judgment. “All three of the explanations proposed fit the data that we have,” he says. “We are being cautious with our interpretations here, but that is the right approach when studying another world such as Mars.” ## Transcript What's more important Rockets are cars? Actually, that's a good first question. Well, I guess I guess it was important. I just might my career is a Mars in cars, so. Yeah, I think we need to transition to sustainable energy and become a spacefaring civilization. Starting with space. Why haven't you gone? You know, besos went up, Branson went off. Do you want to go off? Is that on your to-do list in 22? Or how do you think about that yourself? I will go up at some point, but the I mean that there is an online class B that by which I aspire to guide my actions and that is to take a set of actions that maximizes, probably a future is good and hopefully not pay the the road to hell with good intentions. So, The SpaceX is the pointy Stakes is spacex's to help make Humanity's bayspring civilization and ultimately a multi-planet species. So as to expand the scope and scale Consciousness and ultimately better, understand what questions to ask about the answer, which is the universe. Switching to risk in the context of Tesla and autopilot Auto driving. I mean one of our competitors had a big piece on that this weekend, but it's not all the way thought through and it's written in a back to risk. How do you think about? Obviously that's not zero risk, either your Paving away in that area or country is important because people spend hours and hours a week early and I'm stuck in traffic in and then there's people that died in order accidents at worldwide. There's about a million Automotive deaths per year. So the vast majority of which are due to driver error. So and so if we can have more time to me that that would eventually sold, you know, save on the order of A Million Lives per year and there's about 10 million serious accidents where there's a permanent injury per year. So it's one of those things where you're not going to get rewarded for this really for the for the life that you save, but you will definitely be playing for the last that you don't save. So and I mean it was something. Somebody said that he said that, you know, even if you Say goodnight to the lives with him so that you don't say we're going to see you. The people are worried about democracy, the future of democracy, the state of democracy, part of, that's tied to Silicon Valley. Are you at? My question is, are you worried about democracy are asking me things, you know, if you used to complain, but I mean, talk, the matter is, this is the most prosperous time in human history. So expectations are just too because I like it. How we're good things. Get people's, expectations will always How to recalibrate to how things are but, you know, if you would you rather be and, and by the way, have you actually read? History? Is why some bread? So I think we know where should be. I think, probably happier with the way things are then then maybe it's a nice people are ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6140688/life-on-mars-clues/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6140688/life-on-mars-clues/"},"headline":"Is There Life on Mars? 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