Hold on to your hats, space geeks, Curiosity has detected mysterious methane gas spikes on the surface of Mars!

Why this is important is that it is a gas that is strongly associated with life on Earth. 90 percent of the atmospheric methane is produced by biological processes on Earth and while the source of these mysterious spikes on Mars is unknown, NASA would like nothing better for it to answer the question of whether there was life on the planet at some point in the past.

The surprising part about this is that NASA thought they had come up empty handed looking for methane on the planet 8 months ago so they weren’t expecting this.

We thought we had closed the book on methane. It was disappointing to a lot of people that there wasn’t significant methane on Mars, but that’s where we were.

Christopher Webster from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told Discovery News. And the hits keep coming as Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger has announced:

We have had a major discovery. We have found organics on Mars.

Two years ago Curiosity drilled into the surface of the red planet and came up with positive results for organic compounds being found. At the time, they couldn’t rule out that the organics hitched a ride with the rover from Earth or not but they’re now definitively saying they are from Mars.

While those organics could have been delivered by meteorites they also may have been formed on Mars. In the end, we’ve found the building block for life on the Red Planet.

Go team Curiousity!