AFP – National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Perseverance Mars rover has made what could be its most astonishing discovery to date: possible signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.
The six-wheeled robotic explorer came across an intriguing, arrow-shaped rock dubbed “Cheyava Falls” that may harbour fossilised microbes from billions of years ago, when Mars was a watery world.
Perseverance drilled into the enigmatic rock to collect a core sample on July 21, as it traversed Neretva Vallis, an ancient river valley.
The samples carefully stowed beneath the rover’s belly are destined to eventually return to Earth, where they will undergo more comprehensive analysis.
“Cheyava Falls is the most puzzling, complex, and potentially important rock yet investigated by Perseverance,” project scientist Ken Farley of Caltech said on Thursday.
Three compelling clues have scientists buzzing.
White calcium sulfate veins run the length of the rock, a telltale sign that water once flowed through it.
Between these veins is a reddish middle area, teeming with organic compounds, as detected by the rover’s SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument.
Finally, tiny off-white splotches ringed with black, reminiscent of leopard spots, contain chemicals that suggest energy sources for ancient microbes, according to scans by the PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) instrument.
“On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilised record of microbes living in the subsurface,” said astrobiologist and member of the Perseverance science team from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia David Flannery.
The quest to confirm ancient Martian life is far from over, however.
The real test will come when Perseverance’s precious rock samples are returned to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return Program, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency slated for the 2030s.
