The Curiosity Rover has been analyzing Mars’s surface for the past decade, exploring the Gale Crater, a formation that was the site of a body of water 3 billion years ago.
The Curiosity team found a far greater amount of carbon-12, the lighter of the two isotopes, forming weaker chemical bonds and is subject to chemical reactions at an accelerated rate compared to carbon-13.
Its also been suggested that the gas is the product of chemical reactions between different minerals, carbon dioxide, and water.
Carbon is a tell-tale sign of much bigger life processes, as carbon is the building block of organisms and goes through its own carbon cycle to recycle atoms everywhere in the environment on Earth.
The crater, which is 96 miles long, was created by a meteor that struck Mars’s surface roughly 3.5 billion to 3.8 billion years ago.
“The samples extremely depleted in carbon 13 are a little like samples from Australia taken from sediment that was 2.7 billion years old,” said Christopher H.