Instructions: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Input: This image from NASA's Curiosity rover shows the first sample of powdered rock extracted by the rover's drill. The image was obtained by Curiosity's Mast Camera on Feb. 20, or Sol 193, Curiosity's 193rd Martian day of operations. 
  
 This story was updated at 3:00 p.m. EST. 
  
 It's official: Primitive life could have lived on ancient Mars, NASA says. 
  
 A sample of Mars drilled from a rock by NASA's Curiosity rover and then studied by onboard instruments "shows ancient Mars could have supported living microbes," NASA officials announced today (March 12) in a statement and press conference. 
  
 The discovery comes just seven months after Curiosity landed on Mars to spend at least two years determining if the planet could ever have hosted primitive life. To be clear, the new find is not evidence that Martian life has ever actually existed; Curiosity carries no life-detection instruments among its scientific gear. 
  
 "A fundamental question for this mission is whether Mars could have supported a habitable environment," said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "From what we know now, the answer is yes." [The Search for Life on Mars (Photo Timeline)] 
  
 Drilling into Mars 
  
 Curiosity drilled into a rock on Feb. 8, boring 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) into an outcrop called John Klein using its arm-mounted hammering drill — deeper than any robot had ever dug into the Red Planet before. 
  
 Two weeks later, the rover transferred the resulting gray powder sample into two onboard instruments called Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) and Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM. 
  
 CheMin and SAM identified some of the key chemical ingredients for life in this dust, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon, researchers said. Intriguingly, the mix also suggested a possible energy source for indigenous Martian life, if any ever existed in the area. 
  
 "The range of chemical ingredients we have identified in the sample is impressive, and it suggests pairings such as sulfates and sulfides that indicate a possible chemical energy source for micro-organisms," Paul Mahaffy, SAM principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement. 
  
 The fine-grained John Klein rock also contains clay minerals, suggesting a long-ago aqueous environment — perhaps a lake — that was neutral and not too salty, researchers said. 
  
 "We have found a habitable environment that is so benign and supportive of life that probably — if this water was around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it," said Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena. 
  
 Exactly when this water flowed or pooled is unknown, Grotzinger added, though it was likely at least three billion years ago or so. [The Search for Water on Mars (Photos)] 
  
 This set of images shows the results from the rock abrasion tool from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity (left) and the drill from NASA's Curiosity rover (right). Note how the rock grindings from Opportunity are brownish red, indicating the presence of hematite, a strongly oxidized iron-bearing mineral. Image released March 12, 2013. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/MSSS 
  
 Still looking for complex organics 
  
 SAM is also capable of detecting organic chemicals, the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it. 
  
 The instrument detected two simple chlorinated organics at John Klein, chloromethane and dichloromethane, just it did in a scoop of soil late last year at a different site called Rocknest. Mahaffy urged caution in interpreting the recent find, as the John Klein sample was the first one to go through Curiosity's drill. 
  
 "There's always the possibility that some residual carbon that was on the drill bit made its way into the sample," he said. "So we're really looking forward to repeating this experiment and seeing if these signatures of simple chloromethane compounds persist." 
  
 The next drilling opportunity won't come until May, researchers said, since the relative positions of Earth and Mars will make communicating with Curiosity difficult for most of April. 
  
 Curiosity still hasn't found any complex organic compounds — things like amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. That's not necessarily a surprise, researchers said, since such long, complicated molecules tend to be degraded over time, making their detection a challenge, even here on Earth. 
  
 Even if complex organics are absent at John Klein, the site could still have supported life, researchers said. SAM detected carbon dioxide in the drilled sample, showing that the area had a carbon source for putative microbes to tap into. 
  
 Carbon "can be inorganic to be utilized by a microbe," Grotzinger said, pointing out that many micro-organisms on Earth feed on rocks and use carbon dioxide to generate the organics they incorporate into their cellular machinery. 
  
 Still, the rover team will continue searching for spots with a unique set of characteristics — including protection against Mars' relatively high levels of radiation — that could allow organics to be preserved for billions of years. 
  
 "That could take the entire length of this mission, but we're going to give it our best," Grotzinger said. 
  
 This false-color map shows the area within Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Aug. 5, 2012 PDT (Aug. 6, 2012 EDT) and the location where Curiosity collected its first drilled sample at the "John Klein" rock. Image released March 12, 2013. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU 
  
 Troubleshooting a glitch 
  
 Analysis of the drilled sample was complicated by a computer glitch that's still affecting Curiosity today. 
  
 In late February, Curiosity's handlers determined that a glitch had affected the flash memory on the rover's main, or A-side, computer system. So they swapped the rover over to its backup (B-side) computer, which caused the robot to go into a protective "safe mode" on Feb. 28. 
  
 Curiosity emerged from this safe mode on March 2, only to be put on standby briefly once again a few days later to wait out a Mars-bound solar eruption. Full science operations have yet to resume, but Curiosity's B-side computer is working well as engineers continue to work through the mysterious problem with the A-side, team members said. 
  
 "These tests have provided us with a great deal of information about the rover's A-side memory," Jim Erickson, Curiosity deputy project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, said in a statement. "We have been able to store new data in many of the memory locations previously affected and believe more runs will demonstrate more memory is available." 
  
 Engineers plan to upload two software patches later this week, then reassess when full mission operations can resume, officials said. 
  
 Curiosity landed inside Mars' huge Gale Crater on Aug. 5, kicking off a two-year prime surface mission to determine if the Red Planet has ever been able to support microbial life. CheMin and SAM are two of the 10 instruments it carries to aid this quest. 
  
 While Curiosity has already made a number of interesting discoveries near its landing site — including an ancient streambed where water likely flowed continuously for thousands of years — its main destination is a set of interesting deposits at the base of Mount Sharp, which rises 3 miles (5 kilometers) from Gale's Center. 
  
 Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on SPACE.com. ||||| Editor's note: Follow @CNNLightYears on Twitter for updates on space and science news. 
  
 (CNN) -- Curiosity, humanity's most powerful rover to land on Mars, has made a startling discovery: Conditions that could have supported life once existed there. 
  
 "We have found a habitable environment that is so benign, and supportive of life, that probably if this water was around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it," John Grotzinger, Curiosity project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a Tuesday news conference. 
  
 This discovery is based on the chemical analysis of powder that the rover recovered by drilling a hole in a rock. This was the first time a robot sent from Earth had drilled on another planet. 
  
 The powder from the drilling turned out to have a wealth of chemicals in it, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon. These are ingredients for life, scientists said. 
  
 "What do we mean by habitability? The key thing here is an environment that a microbe could have lived in and maybe even prospered in," Grotzinger said. 
  
 Powder from the drill was a gray-green color, meaning it was not highly oxidized, said David Blake, principal investigator for Curiosity's Chemistry and Mineralogy investigation at NASA's Ames Research Center. That means if there were organic material present there, it could have been preserved. 
  
 Mars rover drills, sees planet's true colors 
  
 The sample had between 20% to 30% of a type of clay called smectite, which forms in the presence of water, Blake said. 
  
 In Yellowknife Bay, the area where the rover is located, it appears "slightly salty liquid water" was once there, said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 
  
 These observations contrast sharply with the findings of Mars rover Opportunity, which landed on a different part of Mars in 2004 and is still chugging along. A rock that Opportunity found called Wopmay appeared to be made of hematite with iron-bearing sulfates, indicative of acidic water. That would not have been a habitable environment. 
  
 The rock that Curiosity found, on the other hand, has calcium sulfate and seems to have been in water with a neutral pH. 
  
 "This rock quite frankly looks like a typical thing that we would get on Earth," Grotzinger said. 
  
 What we've done on Mars, and what's next 
  
 Here's something else exciting: Grotzinger also described what he termed "batteries." Some of the minerals found have various charges and oxidation states. Modern microbiology has determined that tiny organisms can derive energy by feeding on rocks. 
  
 Life on Mars could have taken the form of a microorganism that used the minerals as an energy source. He compares this to a battery-powered light, in which you hook up the wires and electrons flow to make a light bulb turn on. 
  
 Scientists don't have any other examples of extraterrestrial environments with this distinction of having been able to support life. 
  
 "This is probably the only definitely habitable environment that we've described and recorded," said Paul Mahaffy, principal investigator for Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars investigation at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. 
  
 With the habitability issue out of the way, Curiosity has yet to explore the question of organic molecules, which could indicate life but could also come from other sources. 
  
 Grotzinger identified several challenges with this. For example, although the findings concerning water are exciting, the presence of water may mean that organic molecules indicative of life were not well-preserved, Grotzinger said. 
  
 A lot of organic compounds also are degraded in the presence of heat, he said. Mars appears to have cooled with time, so radiation may be the problem instead. 
  
 "Our trick is to find a place where all ... of those things went right, and that could take the entire length of this mission, but we're going to give it our best," he said. But organic molecules could be manufactured on Mars from nonlife sources, or they could come from meteorites and comets. 
  
 Mars rover spots shiny objects 
  
 It's also important to note that Curiosity is not a life-detection mission. 
  
 "If there was microbial metabolism going on, we wouldn't have the ability to measure that," Grotzinger said. 
  
 And if there were microbial fossils in the rock, the rover would not be able to resolve individual fossil microbes even with the many cameras on board Curiosity, including the high-powered MAHLI, Grotzinger said. 
  
 Curiosity won't make its second drill hole until May. Scientists are excited about that because the first sample could have been tainted by material analyzed at a different site on Mars. 
  
 The 2-ton rover landed on Mars on August 6 in a series of acrobatic maneuvers dubbed the "seven minutes of terror." The mission comes with a price tag of $2.5 billion. 
  
 Scientists have now confirmed that each of the many intricate instruments on board the rover are working. "The rover is now fully commissioned for science," Meyer said. He added, "The keys to rover have been turned over to science team - Woohoo!" 
  
 Curiosity landed in Gale Crater, which hosts a mound called Mount Sharp. The bedrock in the crater where the rover drilled appears to be located in an ancient network of stream channels, which came down from the crater's rim, NASA said. 
  
 Curiosity still has plans to travel to Mount Sharp, where it will slowly climb a mountain analyzing the sedimentary rock to explore its geological history. 
  
 "The question is: How many of these different kinds of 'batteries' can we find at Gale Crater? I think that really becomes our mission along with the search for organic compounds," Grotzinger said. 
  
 More space and science news from CNN Light Years ||||| NASA scientists say tests on a Mars rock show the planet could have supported primitive life. 
  
 This image released by NASA shows the Curiosity rover holding a scoop of powdered rock on Mars. The rover recently drilled into a Martian rock for the first time and transferred a pinch of powder to its... (Associated Press) 
  
 The analysis was done by the rover Curiosity, which drilled into the rock, crushed it and tested a tiny sample. The rover was the first spacecraft sent to Mars that could collect a sample from deep inside a rock. 
  
 At a briefing at NASA's Washington headquarters on Tuesday, NASA scientist said the rock contains clay minerals that formed in a watery environment _ an environment that may be favorable for microscopic organisms. 
  
 Curiosity had already found a hint of the site's watery past _ an ancient streambed that the six-wheel rover crossed to get to the flat bedrock. 
  
 The rover made a dramatic landing near the Mars equator last August for a two-year mission. |||||
Output:
NASA scientists examining their first sample of Martian rock dug out by the rover Curiosity found some remarkable things in there: sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and carbon. In other words, ingredients that show the planet once could have supported life. Lead scientist Michael Mayer sums it up thusly: "A fundamental question for this mission is whether Mars could have supported a habitable environment. From what we know now, the answer is yes." Curiosity took the sample from where it had previously found an ancient streambed, making today's announcement more of a confirmation of what scientists suspected rather than a bombshell revelation. They found that the rock has clay minerals that could have theoretically been home to living microbes, reports the AP. "We have characterized a very ancient, but strangely new 'gray Mars' where conditions once were favorable for life," says another scientist on the team, reports CNN. (And if life did exist, what happened to it? Capitalism wiped it out, of course, theorized Hugo Chavez.)