While NASA’s Curiosity rover continues to crawl over the reddish, radiation-blasted wasteland, organic geochemist James M.T. Lewis is in search of salts through its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) lab and Chemistry and Mineralogy Instrument (CheMin) on board. He led a study recently published in
“On Earth, life is one of the processes that can concentrate organic salts,” Lewis tells SYFY WIRE. “Any process on Mars that concentrates organic salts and organic matter is really interesting to us. We're saying that organic salts are a really good explanation for a lot of SAM data, but we aren't yet completely sure if they're present, and if they are, what forms they might be in.”