NASA has found traces of possible ancient life on Mars dating back billions of years.
NASA’s Perseverance rover has found signs of ancient life on a rock it imaged on Mars.
Scientists working on the findings of the Perseverance rover have identified a rock that bears signs of having hosted microbial life billions of years ago, according to NASA’s statement.
Named “Cheyava Falls” by scientists after a waterfall in the Grand Canyon, the arrowhead-shaped rock contains interesting features that could provide clues about whether Mars hosted microscopic life in the past.
Analysis conducted with instruments on the Perseverance rover showed that the 1-meter-tall and 60-centimeter-wide rock bore traces that matched the description of ancient life.
TRACES FROM BILLIONS OF YEARS AGO IN THE DISCOVERED AREA
The rock was found to show that there was water flowing in the area explored by the rover billions of years ago and likely exhibited chemical traces and structures created by life forms.
Perseverance’s 22nd rock sample, “Cheyava Falls,” was found July 21 while exploring the northern rim of the Neretva Vallis, a 400-meter-wide ancient river valley carved long ago by water flowing into Jezero Crater.
Cheyava Falls was scanned several times by the rover’s “Scanning Habitable Environments for Organics and Chemicals with Raman and Luminescence (SHERLOC)” instrument, which found it contained organic compounds.
It was noted that these carbon-based molecules are considered the building blocks of life, but they can also be formed by non-biological processes.
TRACES ON “CHEYAVA FALLS”
“Cheyava Falls is the most surprising, complex and potentially important rock ever studied by Perseverance,” said Ken Farley, a Perseverance project team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “We have made the first convincing observations of organic matter, distinct colored spots that indicate chemical reactions that microbial life can use as energy sources, and the water necessary for life flowing through the rock. However, we have not fully explored how the rock formed and to what extent nearby rocks heated and contributed to ‘Cheyava Falls’.”
“Cheyava Falls” has large veins of white calcium sulfate running through the rock, with bands of material between them suggesting the presence of hematite, one of the minerals that gives Mars its rusty reddish color.
On closer examination of the red areas in question, numerous irregularly shaped, millimeter-sized dirty white spots surrounded by black substances resembling a leopard pattern were also detected.
Perseverance’s Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) instrument determined that these black halos contain both iron and phosphate.
“These spots are a big surprise,” said David Flannery, an astrobiologist at the University of Queensland in Australia and a member of the Perseverance team. “On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilized remains of microbes living underground.”
LEOPARD PATTERNS
On the other hand, it is also possible that the millimeter-sized olivine crystals and sulfate detected in the rock may have formed by the crystallization of magma on the planet and that they may have adhered to the rock at uninhabitable temperatures and formed the leopard patterns through non-biological processes.
Scientists are also evaluating other views on the observed traces and state that additional research is necessary for a definitive finding of ancient life.
