WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A sample obtained by NASA’s rover perseverance of rocks formed billions of years ago from sediments at the bottom of a lake contains potential signs of ancient microbial life in Mars, according to scientists, although minerals found in the sample can also form through non -biological processes.
The discovery, detailed in a survey published on Wednesday, represents one of the best evidence so far about the possibility that the earth’s planetary neighbor has already sheltered life.
Since landing on the Martian surface in 2021, the six -wheeled Rover has been exploring the Jezero crater, an area in the northern hemisphere of the planet that has been flooded with water and housed an old lake basin, looking for signs of ancient life. Perseverance has been collecting rock samples and loose material called Regoito and analyzing them with their various onboard instruments.
Unique opportunity
Legacy Card: Far beyond a service
The Rover collected the newly described sample called Sapphire Canyon sample in a place known as Rochosa Bright Angel. This formation consists of thin granulation and coarse granulation slips, a type of sedimentary rock composed of gravel size particles cemented by thinner granulation sediments.
Planetary scientist Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University, who led the study published in the journal Nature, said a “potential bioassine” was detected in sedimentary rocks from several billion years.
This occurred in the form of two minerals that seem to have formed as a result of chemical reactions between the mud of the Bright Angel formation and the organic matter also present in this mud, Hurowitz said. They are: Vivianite, an iron phosphate mineral, and greigite, an iron sulfide mineral.
Continues after advertising
“These reactions seem to have occurred shortly after the mud was deposited in the back of the lake. On Earth, reactions like these, which combine organic matter and chemical compounds in the mud to form new minerals, such as vivianite and greigite, are usually driven by microbit activity,” said Hurowitz.
“Microbes are consuming organic matter in these environments and producing these new minerals as a byproduct of their metabolism,” Hurowitz said.
However, Hurowitz made some warnings.
Continues after advertising
“The reason, however, for which we cannot say that this is more than a possible bioassine is that there are chemical processes that can cause similar reactions in the absence of biology, and we cannot rule out these processes completely based only on Rover data,” said Hurowitz.
Mars has not always been the inhospitable place that is today, with liquid water on its surface in a distant past. Scientists suspect that microbial life could have existed in Jezero crater. They believe that river channels overflowed from the crater wall and created a lake for over 3.5 billion years.
The sample Sapphire Canyon was collected in July 2024 of a set of rocky outcrops on the edges of the Neretva Vallis, an ancient river valley sculpted by the water that ran to the Jezero crater.
Continues after advertising
The sample collected and analyzed by Perseverance provides a new example of a potential type of potential bioassinature that the research community can explore to try to understand whether or not these characteristics were formed by life, Hurowitz said, “or alternatively whether nature has conspired to present characteristics that mimic life.”
“Finally, follow -up research will provide us with a set of testable hypotheses on how to determine if biology is responsible for generating these characteristics in Bright Angel formation, which we can evaluate by examining the sample Sapphire Canyon if it is returned to Earth,” added Hurowitz.
Por Will Dunham
