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One small step for man, one giant step to discovering Martiankind.
After years of searching, NASA’s Perseverance rover has discovered some polka-dotted rocks that may provide the strongest evidence yet of Martian life, per a groundbreaking study published in the journal “Nature” on Wednesday.
“The thing I find most exciting about this sample is that it contains features large enough to be seen with the naked eye that could be examined to test for past life,” said Michael Tice, a study co-author and Mars 2020 science team member, per the Washington Post. “That’s surprisingly rare when you are studying evidence for ancient microscopic life.”
The rover discovered the “building rocks” while roaming the inside of Neretva Vallis, an ancient river valley on the Red Planet. Billions of years ago, this intergalactic aqueduct supplied water to the Jezero Crater, an alleged former lake bed that supposedly held the precursors to life.
These reddish, clay-rich mudstones, the 25th of the over 30 samples gathered since the Perseverance began doing Red Planet recon in 2021, contained carbon molecules — a building block of life, New Scientist reported.
In addition, they were also speckled with greenish dots, dubbed poppy seeds and leopard spots, that were enriched with iron phosphate and iron sulfide, which, on Earth, are released when microorganisms devour organic matter, the Independent reported.
“The sample contains what we believe to be a potential biosignature (a feature with a potentially biological origin,” gushed study lead author Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University. “Microbes will eat the organic matter and react it with the mud, and the by-product of that reaction is these minerals.”
And while the origins of said matter is yet unclear Hurowitz, deemed these cosmic rocks of ages “the first compelling signal of organic matter that we’ve had since we landed in Jezero Crater.”
Of course, this discovery doesn’t mean we’ve proved that extraterrestrials inhabited Mars.
Scientists have pointed out that it could have had a non-biological basis, such as a meteorite or was formed due to heat.
“That’s part of the reason why we can’t go so far as to say, ‘A-ha, this is proof positive of life,’’’ said Hurowitz, per the Independent. “All we can say is one of the possible explanations is microbial life, but there could be other ways to make this set of features that we see.”
Nonetheless, he declared that the “available evidence collected by the rover,” including the fact that the rocks don’t appear to be heated, more strongly indicates “the possibility of microbial activity.”
To confirm that this is indeed the case, these Martian rocks will need to be analyzed on Earth.
“These rocks are prime targets in the search for ancient life on Mars,” said Dauphas, a professor at the University of Chicago, in an email. “Only [a] Mars sample return can answer the billion-dollar question: ‘Was there ever life on Mars?’”
Unfortunately, returning the space stones to the home planet may prove an Odyssey in and of itself — like a geological version of the interstellar survival thriller “The Martian.”
When NASA originally launched Perseverance in 2020, they planned to have the samples back home by 2030.
This date of retrieval was extended another ten years as NASA slashed its Mars Sample Return Mission budget.
In the interim, scientists may have to rely on Earthly simulations to determine the viability of ancient aliens on Mars, Hurowitz lamented.
