Mars once had conditions favorable for microbial life, NASA scientists announced Tuesday, March 12, 2013.
According to Prof Siegert, it would be "extraordinary" if the samples did not reveal signs of microbial life.
They have also reported the discovery of microbial life in the lake waters.
Scientists will eventually find widespread evidence of simple, microbial life, they theorized, but complex animal or plant life will prove extremely rare.
The vehicle will be scouring Mount Sharp in the crater's centre looking for evidence that past environments could have favoured microbial life.
And the measurements from Viking on the biology experiments did not suggest evidence of microbial life or any life on the surface of Mars.
Last week, scientists announced the results from the first drilling: Curiosity had discovered an ancient Martian environment that could have been favorable for primitive microbial life.
In the months ahead, scientists expect to probe beneath the planet's surface crust for evidence of chemistry favorable to microbial life, using the robot rover's unique high-speed drill.
It looked for life in the form of microbial life by looking at respiration products, by looking at how a microscopic form of life would ingest atmospheric gas and exhale gases.
Dr. LEVINE: Yes, the labeled-release experiment, the principal investigator was Gil Levin, and Gil to this day thinks that his experiment gave evidence of microbial life on the surface of mars.
I'm reminded of a passage written by Milan Kundera, author of 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being, ' in which he talks about starting with what you can see and then going deeper and deeper to the microbial level in order to find the life inside what is apparent on the surface.
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Moreover, the Curiosity rover, which is equipped with 11 scientific instruments to probe for conditions suitable for life, isn't designed to detect the signs of microbial activity or any traces of fossilized bacteria.
As astrobiologists dig and scrape in amongst the microbial inhabitants of Earth's most hostile environments to understand the possibility of life elsewhere, they learn things that have economic uses.
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