Mars rover finds potential signs of ancient life, scientists thrilled

This is surprising news from NASA. The Perseverance rover exploring Mars has encountered something that may constitute evidence that life once existed on the Red Planet. The clue is a fragment of rock shaped like an arrowhead found on the planet's surface.

According to the portal space.com, the rock contains "chemical signatures and structures that could have been formed by microbiological life billions of years ago, when Mars was much wetter than it is now."

The instruments with which the Perseverance rover is equipped detected organic compounds in the boulder, which are precursors to the chemistry of life as we know it. Calcium sulfate veins run through the length of the rock found, which are mineral deposits suggesting water once flowed through it.

While examining the boulder, the rover encountered dozens of millimeter-sized spots, each surrounded by a black ring containing iron and phosphate. We can observe the same phenomenon on Earth due to chemical reactions conducted by microbes.

“These spots are a big surprise. On Earth, such features in rocks are often associated with the fossil record of microbes living below the surface,” said David Flannery, an astrobiologist and member of the Perseverance science team from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, in a statement.

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The rock being studied by the rover, which scientists have named Cheyava Falls, is located on the edge of an ancient river valley spanning 1,300 feet (400 meters) called Neretva Vallis. Scientists suspect this ancient channel was carved long ago by water flowing into Jezero Crater.

Neretva Vallis runs along the inner wall of this region. In one possible scenario, mud that already contained organic compounds was deposited into the valley and later cemented into the Cheyava Falls rock, from which Perseverance collected a sample on July 21 (Eastern Time). A second episode of water seeping into the formed rock would have created the calcium sulfate veins and black ring spots that the team sees today.

Scientists emphasize that the visible features of the rock are not conclusive evidence of ancient microbiological life on Mars — at least not yet. It’s possible, for example, that the observed calcium sulfate entered the rock due to a volcanic event. However, whether such non-biological chemical reactions could have led to the observed black spots "remains an open question," scientists say.

We have scanned this rock with lasers and X-rays and imaged it literally day and night from almost every possible angle,” Ken Farley, a Perseverance project scientist from Caltech in California, said in a statement. “Scientifically speaking, Perseverance has nothing more to offer,” he added.

Transmitting a rock sample to Earth could provide scientists with much more information, which will be neither simple nor cheap.