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NASA finds what it was looking for: Life may have existed on Mars billions of years ago

2024-07-27 09:35:18Lifestyle SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

NASA finds what it was looking for: Life may have existed on Mars billions of

NASA's Perseverance rover may have found a key clue that is crucial to its mission to Mars: geological evidence that may suggest the existence of life on the red planet billions of years ago.

The robotic explorer encountered a vein-filled red rock on July 18 that appears to be scattered with leopard spots. The stains may indicate that ancient chemical reactions occurring within the rock once supported microbial organisms.

"These spots are a big surprise," David Flannery, a member of the NASA Perseverance science team and an astrobiologist at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, said in a statement. "On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with fossilized records of microbes living underground."

The research is still preliminary, and NASA scientists have not yet confirmed how the rock was formed, which would require studying it on Earth. But the arrowhead-shaped specimen could help the team find out if Mars was once a planet that hosted life.

"We are absolutely thrilled to have this sample in the bag!" said Briony Horgan, co-investigator on the Perseverance Rover mission and professor of planetary science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, in an email.

"This rock is exactly the kind of sample we came to Mars to find, and we can't wait to get it to our labs here on Earth," she said. "This is exactly the type of potential microbial signature that was predicted when NASA designed the Mars 2020 mission, and we have used every instrument in our payload to find and understand this rock."

Searching for signs of ancient life on Mars

The rock, nicknamed Cheyava Falls after one of the Grand Canyon's waterfalls, intrigues scientists for many reasons.

White veins of calcium sulfate provide clear evidence that water, essential to life, once flowed through the rock. The rover used the Raman & Luminescence Habitable Environments Scan for Organics and Chemicals, or SHERLOC, instrument to identify carbon-based organic molecules within rocks.

And the irregularly shaped leopard spots tested by the rover's PIXL instrument, short for Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, revealed iron and phosphate within the features, Morgan Cable, a research scientist on the rover team, said in a video shared by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"We've never seen these three things together on Mars before," Cable said.

The team also discovered the possible presence of hematite among the white bands of calcium sulfate in the rock. Hematite is one of the minerals responsible for the red color of Mars.

Leopard spots may have occurred when chemical reactions with hematite turned the rock from red to white, which could release iron and phosphate and potentially cause the formation of black rings. Such reactions can also provide a source of energy for microbes.

"Uvara Cheyava is the strangest, most complex and potentially important rock yet investigated by Perseverance," Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist and professor of geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a statement.

The team also discovered millimeter-sized olivine crystals within the same rock. Olivine, previously discovered in another part of the crater by Perseverance, is a mineral that forms from magma. According to the team, the olivine present in the Cheyava Falls rock may be related to rocks that formed elsewhere in the valley.

The rover team is facing a host of questions as it studies the rock and tries to determine what processes might have formed it.

Cheyava Falls may have started as a mixture of deposited mud and organic compounds that eventually cemented to become rock. Later, water may have seeped through cracks in the rock, depositing minerals to create calcium sulfate veins and leopard spots.

But it's also possible that olivine and sulfate became part of the rock due to hot temperatures on Mars, causing a non-biological chemical reaction that created the leopard spots.


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