Note: Organic matter does not mean life. It is a precursor to life. It does make the possibility of life on ancient Mars more likely.
Note: Organic matter does not mean life. It is a precursor to life. It does make the possibility of life on ancient Mars more likely.
Ah! This reference paper goes into more detail about how the reference spectra for the Raman fluorescence were acquired: https://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2022.0023 They built a fluorescence spectrometer identical to the SHERLOC tool onboard the Perseverance rover on Mars and tested it against a library of molecules of interest, including all L-amino acids and a few of the D-amino acids. Turns out the spectrometer cannot differentiate between the two: