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Does anyone know whether Curiosity has the tools/systems to detect whether life exists on Mars now?

• swamp40 13y ago
  Officially, no it wasn't built to detect life. But there are cameras all over the thing. So if something is scurrying around leaving tracks or skeletons, we should be able to see that just fine. Or if it rolls up on a flower or a tree, that ought to be pretty obvious.
  • blacksmith_tb 13y ago
    A bit trickier with microbial life, though. Though it wouldn't be impossible for it to bump into a stromatolite, say.
• InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Not exactly. It was not specifically designed for detecting life, but it has a lot of instruments that could provide enormously strong evidence for life. For example, if you took a pile of mulch and put it through Curiosity's SAM instrument suite you could look at the data coming out of it and go "yup, that's a bunch of wood chips, unquestionably". But that would require quite a bit of luck. If there are only extremely small amounts of materials of biogenic origin Curiosity is unlikely to be able to definitively identify them.