iron, CO², sulfur, water, and related compounds, sounds like there was water with a low ph, which would leach out all sorts of elements from the rocks and "soil" of mars the implication bieng that there was a varity of "soups" possibly condusive for life to occur, or take hold in. and even if not, there are now confirmed surface deposits of elements snd minerals usefull for any potential humans setting up shop on mars.....think, rocket fuel and the elements needed for growing food in greenhouses * still need to find a big pile of nitrogen compounds before getting excited* rocket
On a young planet, all water has a low pH, because it is formed by the condensation of the gaseous part of the matter ejected by volcanism, which consists mainly of water, carbon dioxide, sulfurous gases and halogen hydrides, where all substances but water are acids.
In the next few hundred millions years after a planet has cooled enough to be covered by liquid water, the water becomes gradually neutralized by leaching mainly potassium, magnesium, sodium and calcium ions from the igneous rocks (smaller amounts of iron(II), manganese(II) and other ions are also leached).
The chemical elements that are required for the appearance of life are ubiquitous.
What is much rarer is to have a planet of the right size, orbiting around a stable star at the right distance and having an adequate source of internal heat that can provide indirectly the source of chemical energy for the first living beings, and also the occurrence at the right place of certain minerals such as Fe-Co-Ni sulfides, that can catalyze the formation of complex organic molecules, before their role is taken by organic enzymes.
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O2 is the oxygen gas molecule. Two oxygen atoms stuck together. CO2 is carbon dioxide, a molecule with one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms.
I believe that you are using ASCII to approximate the chemical formula, which really does depend on subscripts to be accurate. I'm simply being facetious in the GP, but superscript is really beyond inaccurate, IMHO. Superscript means other things entirely. Don't you agree that's more confusing than collapsing it into ASCII?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_formula
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Molecular_Input_Lin...
The Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry System (SMILES) is a specification in the form of a line notation for describing the structure of chemical species using short ASCII strings. SMILES strings can be imported by most molecule editors for conversion back into two-dimensional drawings or three-dimensional models of the molecules.
Double, triple, and quadruple bonds are represented by the symbols =, #, and $ respectively as illustrated by the SMILES O=C=O (carbon dioxide...)