Piquing Our Curiosity: NASA Mum on Rover Breakthrough

By Danielle Lucey

Update (11/29/12 2:27): NASA has released a statement saying Curiosity hasn't found any organic compounds on Mars. 





One of NASA’s bigwigs on the Curiosity Mars rover program told NPR this week that the robot has potentially uncovered a historic finding — exactly what though remains a mystery.



The new results came from the rover’s SAM sensor, or Sample Analysis at Mars, which gets a taste for Martian soil and gives a chemical breakdown of what it finds. 



"We're getting data from SAM as we sit here and speak, and the data looks really interesting," John Grotzinger, principal investigator for Curiosity, told NPR.



Slate speculates that NASA is keeping quiet on the news because it wants to ensure the results are accurate. Contamination is an issue on extraterrestrial missions, where gas and dirt from Earth might have hitched a very long ride, showing results that falsely indicate a huge finding, like carbon compounds or methane. 



What is curious is Grotzinger’s openness with how impressive the finding will be, once NASA is allowed to divulge exactly what it is.



"This data is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good," continued Grotzinger, who is based at NASA’s Jet Propulstion Laboratory, in the NPR interview.



Wired is reporting that NASA is waiting to unveil the news at the 2012 American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco the first week of December. Until then, it seems Curiosity will continue to live up to its name.