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NASA’s Perseverance rover may have found signs of ancient life in a rock on Mars; scientists on the mission are jubilant but remain cautious because more analysis is needed to confirm the discovery.
The rover came across an intriguing arrowhead-shaped rock that contained chemical signatures and structures that could have been created by microbial life billions of years ago, when Mars was significantly wetter than it is today. Inside the rock, which scientists have dubbed “Cheyava Falls,” Perseverance’s instruments detected organic compounds that were precursors to the chemistry of life as we know it. Running along the length of the rock are veins of calcium sulfate, mineral deposits that indicate water once flowed through the rock.
The rover also found dozens of millimeter-sized spots, each surrounded by a black ring that mimics the appearance of leopard spots. These rings contain iron and phosphate, which are the result of microbe-driven chemical reactions that also occur on Earth.
“These spots are a big surprise,” said David Flannery, an astrobiologist at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia and member of the Perseverance science team. expression“On Earth, such features in rocks are often associated with fossilized records of microbes living underground.”
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“We’ve never seen these three things together on Mars before,” Perseverance team scientist Morgan Cable said in a video NASA released on YouTube today (July 25).
Cheyava Falls lies at the edge of an ancient river valley called Neretva Vallis, a 400-meter-wide (437-yard-wide) area. Scientists suspect that 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 had organic compounds poured into the valley and then cemented into the Cheyava Falls rock that Perseverance sampled on July 21. A second episode of water seeping into the rock may have created the calcium sulfate veins and black rings the team saw today.
To be clear, the rock’s visible features are not indisputable evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars — at least not yet. For example, it’s possible that the calcium sulfate observed was introduced into the rock at uninhabitable temperatures, perhaps during a nearby volcanic event. But whether such nonbiological chemical reactions led to the observed black dots is an open question, the scientists say.
“This trip to the Neretva Vallis riverbed was very rewarding in that we found something we’ve never seen before. It’s going to give our scientists a lot to study,” Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement.
“We irradiated this rock with lasers and X-rays and imaged it literally day and night, from every conceivable angle,” says Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist at Caltech in California. “Scientifically, Perseverance has nothing more to offer.”
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To fully understand what really happened in this ancient river valley billions of years ago, scientists want to bring a sample of Cheyava Falls back to Earth and examine it with powerful instruments not available on Perseverance’s limited equipment.
But the complex Mars Sample Return effort has faced multiple setbacks in recent months after costs skyrocketed to $11 billion. In its current form, the program requires multiple launches to Mars to land a rover on the Red Planet, after which Perseverance would either fly to the rover and drop off the samples it collected or drop them off at a recovery helicopter that could complete the delivery. A booster would then launch the samples into orbit, where a rover would collect them and return them to Earth.
NASA has evaluated a variety of simpler alternatives from industry and academic groups, and Contracts worth $1.5 million awarded There are seven companies researching the effort, with three of the agency’s own research centers also conducting studies.