Antiseptic and life-killing, the chemical helps explain why the martian atmosphere and surface are void of life.
Finding it could spur attempts to look for other theorized elements -- like nitrogen compounds. And the result, reported in this month's issue of the journal Icarus, could drive decisions to design an instrument to measure hydrogen peroxide during future Mars missions.
Guy Webster, a NASA Jet Propulsion Lab spokesman, said it was unlikely to alter the scientific missions carried out by rovers currently on the red planet.
To detect the chemical, which was long theorized but never before confirmed, researchers had to be in the right place at the right time.
The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, perched near the 14,000-foot summit of a dormant Hawaiian volcano, is a sleuth that works in a slice of the light spectrum that boldly reveals the fingerprint of even trace amounts of hydrogen peroxide. The team pointed the scope into clear skies at midnight last summer, when Mars and Earth drew closer than they had been since Neanderthals ruled Europe.
The scientific legwork that allowed the astronomy team to peer through Mauna Kea's high, dry atmosphere was Todd Clancy's, the research team leader.
Clancy had worked on the Big Island telescope before. Up to a year before the historic event, he asked for time on the telescope during the Mars opposition.
At that time, Mars was closest to the sun, meaning the planet warmed, said project team member Brad Sandor. Warmth produced more water vapor in the atmosphere. Hydrogen peroxide is produced by the action of sunlight on water.
When past searches for the chemical came up empty, researchers wondered if their atmospheric models were wrong.
So the project could have given new life to the models or helped to undermine their credibility.
"If you're looking under these very best of conditions and with this particular telescope, and you don't see it, you might be able to say more concretely maybe it's not there," said Sandor, a Space Science Institute researcher whose specialty is the atmospheres of Earth, Mars and Venus. Hydrogen peroxide exists in trace amounts in the martian atmosphere -- in doses as low as ozone-eating chlorofluorocarbons on Earth. But the small amount pulls more than its weight.
Acting as a catalyst, it drives the abundance of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in the martian atmosphere. Without hydrogen peroxide, molecular oxygen -- now a tiny sliver -- would soar to compose 10 percent of the martian atmosphere. [End]