A sample obtained by the Rover Perseverance of NASA of reddish rock formed billions of years ago from sediments at the bottom of a lake contains potential signs of ancient microbial life on Mars, according to scientists, although the minerals detected in the sample can also be formed through non -biological processes.
The discovery of the six -wheeled rover in the Jezero crater represents one of the best tests to date on the possibility that the land planetary neighbor has once housed life.
Perseverance Joel Hurowitz scientist at Stony Brook University, lead author of the study published in Nature magazine, said that a “potential biofirm” was detected in the rock that was formed at a time when it was believed that the Jezero crater had been an aqueous environment, between 3,200 and 3,800 million years ago.
NASA’s interim administrator Sean Duffy said at a press conference that the American space agency scientists examined the data for a year and concluded that “we cannot find another explanation, so this could be the clearest sign of life we have ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting.”
NASA published an image of the rock, a very fine and rusty red grain lutita, with ring -shaped characteristics that resemble leopard spots and dark marks that resemble poppy seeds. These characteristics may have occurred when the rock was being formed by chemical reactions that involve microbes, according to researchers.
A potential biofirma is defined as a substance or structure that can have a biological origin but that needs more data or more studies before being able to reach a conclusion about the absence or presence of life.
Nicky Fox, associate administrator of the NASA scientific missions management, said scientists were not announcing the discovery of a living organism.
“It’s not life itself,” Fox said at the press conference.
Since 2021, the Rover has been exploring the Jezero crater, an area in the northern hemisphere of the planet that was once flooded with water and houses an old lake basin. Scientists believe that the river channels spilled on the wall of the crater and created a lake.
Perseverance has been analyzing rocks and loose material called Regolito with its instruments on board and then collecting samples and sealing them in tubes stored inside the rover.
He collected the sample called Sapphire Canyon in July 2024 of a rock called Cheyava Falls in a place known as Bright Angel. The sample came from a set of rocky outcrops at the edges of Neretva Vallis, an old river valley of approximately a quarter of mile (400 meters) wide carved by the water that rushes to the crater.
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NASA Rover finds a possible sign of ancient life in the Martian rocks
Two minerals were detected that seem to have been formed as a result of chemical reactions between the Bright Angel formation and organic matter present in that mud, Hurowitz said. They are: Vivianita, a mineral that contains iron and phosphorus, and greigita, a mineral that contains iron and sulfur.
“These reactions seem to have taken place shortly after the mud was deposited at the bottom of the lake. On Earth, reactions like these, which combine organic matter and chemical compounds in the mud to form new minerals such as the Vivianita and the Greigita, are often driven by the activity of the microbes,” Hurowitz told Reuters.
“Microbios consume organic matter in these environments and produce these new minerals as a byproduct of their metabolism,” said Hurowitz.
Rover’s instruments found that the rock was rich in organic carbon, sulfur, phosphorus and iron in its oxidized form, oxide. This combination of chemical compounds could have offered a rich source of energy for microbial metabolism, Hurowitz said.
But Hurowitz offered some precautionary words.
“The reason, however, for which we cannot affirm that this is more than a potential biofirma is that there are chemical processes that can cause similar reactions in the absence of biology, and we cannot discard those processes completely only based on the rover data,” said Hurowitz.
Mars has not always been the inhospitable place that is today, with liquid water on its surface in the distant past.
The sample collected and analyzed by Perseverance provides a new example of a type of potential biofirma that the research community can explore to try to understand whether these characteristics were formed by life or not, said Hurowitz, “or alternatively, if nature has conspired to present characteristics that mimic life activity.”
“We can advance a lot in this issue with laboratory and field work experiments here on Earth to try to understand the various ways that could create characteristics such as those we observed in the Bright Angel training. But the final tests can only be carried out in the sample of the Sapphire Canyon core if it is brought back to the earth for its study,” Hurowitz added.
The current budget proposal of the president of the United States, Donald Trump, would cancel the existing mission Mars Sample Return of the NASA. Duffy said NASA is examining several forms of recovery of potential samples or even sending equipment to Mars to perform more analysis there.
“We are going to see our budgets and we will see our time, and how we spend the money better and what technology we have to recover the samples more quickly,” Duffy said.
With Reuters information.
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