Curiosity hits hole-in-one in search for life on Mars

The NASA Curiosity rover's first test drill hole in Martian rock apparently tapped an ancient lake bed. In an even more stunning discovery, the gray, clay-like rock bears traces of carbon that could be evidence of life from the Red Planet's disant past. /NASA images

A little luck sprinkled with a measure of NASA genius appears to have led to a major discovery on Mars.

In August, NASA's Curiosity rover landed close enough to a suspected ancient lake bed that mission leaders decided to take a detour away from their top objective, 14,000-foot-tall Mount Sharp, to collect a rock sample. In the Curiosity mission gameplan, the first use of the drill at the end of rover's robotic arm was planned to be only a test of the hardware and a "flushing" of the rover's rock dust collection and analysis system to make sure there was no contamination from Earth.

But photos of both the drill site and the rock dust collected from the drilling supported the lake bed theory, and an analysis of the rock dust was launched. Here are some excerpts from Curiosity chemistry instrumentation scientist David Blake's comments on NPR's Science Friday:

"We actually drove away from our primary destination, which is a place called Mount Sharp. It's a 5,000-meter, about 14,000-foot-tall, mountain in the middle of Gale Crater that has all these layered sediments from early Mars. So that's our ultimate destination. But it's about eight kilometers away. We kind of drove in the opposite direction because there was this real interesting area that many people on the team thought actually could be a lake bed. And so we're going to do one additional drill here to kind of make sure what we have and understand what it is, and then we'll take the long march to Mount Sharp. ...

"If we find (in the second drilling sample) what we think we've already found in the minerals, which tell us it's a habitable environment, and if the SAM instrument, which is a suite of instruments that do organic analyses, can find some organic compounds that clearly aren't from Earth, well, that would be a home run.

"And I'm not even suggesting it would be from organisms, just to know that there was carbon contained -- organic carbon -- contained inside this rock for three billion years that we could come there and analyze today."