PERSEVERANCE ROVER DISCOVERS POTENTIALS SIGNS OF ANCIENT MICROBIAL LIFE ON MARS
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has been exploring the red planet since February 2021 in an effort to find evidence of past life and determine whether it was ever livable. It appears to have discovered its most important lead now. A sample gathered by Perseverance may include signs of ancient microbial life, according a research published in Nature.
The essential piece was discovered in Jezero Crater in an old dry riverbed. It was chosen as the landing location for NASA's Mars 2020 mission and is believed to have once been flooded with water. In 2024, the sample was collected from a rock called Cheyava Falls, which was named after a waterfall in the Grand Canyon. Astrobiologists have been interested in this rock since it was discovered because they believe it may be a sign that bacteria flourished in the Martian muck some 3.5 billion years ago.
Potential biosignatures, or substances or structures that may have a biological origin, appear to be present in the Sapphire Canyon sample. On reddish mudstone, in particular, scientists discovered green spots like leopards that indicate a "redox reaction," in which the animals lost electrons to the mud and left behind minerals like greigite and vivianite. To ascertain whether this is actually a trace of life, more research is necessary. Christian Schröder, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, told National Geographic that this is the first time chemical reactions on Mars that are consistent with—but not conclusive evidence of—a biological origin have been seen.
The boulder containing the biosignatures is from Bright Angel, a rocky region of Mars. It is situated on the outskirts of Neretva Vallis, an old valley that was formerly traversed by a river millions of years ago. The rover detected the outcrops' distinctive composition there. These clay and silt-based sedimentary mudstone rocks are renowned for their exceptional ability to preserve the planet's prehistoric microbial life. They also contain other important minerals like phosphorus, sulfur, oxidised iron (rust), and organic carbon.
Joel Hurowitz, a Perseverance scientist and primary study author, said, "The combination of chemical substances we uncovered in the Bright Angel formation could have been a significant source of energy for microbial metabolisms." We didn't necessarily have a viable biosignature, though, just because we noticed so many strong chemical signals in the data. We had to examine the potential meaning of the data.
If verified, this discovery would indicate that bacteria were present on both Earth and Mars simultaneously, and that they all developed and flourished, providing ground-breaking new understandings of how life manages to survive in spite of environmental challenges. According to geologist Michael Tice, a co-author of the paper, "I think it could be telling us something pretty deep about how life evolves."