![](https://lifeboat.com/blog.images/nasa-rover-detects-organic-molecules-on-the-surface-of-mars2.jpg)
While it’s an exciting discovery, it falls short of demonstrating that carbon-based lifeforms once lived on the surface of the Red Planet. It is, however, a step in that direction.
“This experiment was definitely successful,” Maëva Millan, postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center and lead author of a new study published on Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, told Inverse.
“While we haven’t found what we were looking for, biosignatures, we showed that this technique is really promising,” she added.