NASA's Curiosity Rover has discovered long carbon chains on Mars. On Earth, molecules like these are overwhelmingly produced by biological processes.

To study Mars’s chemical and mineral makeup, the Curiosity rover drills one to 1.5 inches down into the subsurface, then drops the powdered rock samples into an instrument in its belly called CheMin. The instrument, developed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, uses X-ray diffraction to analyze rocks and soil.