NASA used a number of surprising terms to describe their new discoveries on Mars, including: “Attractive,” “Intriguing,” “Persuasive” and “It’s startling.”
The space agency’s rover Perseverance recently drilled into Martian rocks, where its six-wheeled robot found organic molecules – the so-called “building blocks of life.” The robot took samples, which scientists then looked inside to find the building blocks of life. potential Traces of ancient microbial life have been found. “The rocks show chemical signatures and structures that could have been formed by life billions of years ago, when water flowed in the area explored by the rover,” NASA said in a statement. But it’s important to note that it will take many more years of research to confirm this possibility.
Indeed, areas of Mars were once filled with springs, roaring rivers and vast lakes — aquatic environments that could have provided the setting for the evolution of primitive life.
A NASA scientist saw the first Voyager images, and he was horrified by what he saw.
In the image below, you can see a new Martian structure that NASA scientists observed in this rock: a white spot surrounded by a black ring called the “leopard spot.”
“These spots are a big surprise,” David Flannery, an astrobiologist at Queensland University of Technology and a member of the Perseverance science team, said in a statement. “On Earth, these kinds of features in rocks are often associated with the fossil record of microorganisms living below the surface.”
It’s a very intriguing connection: These spots form through chemical reactions on Earth that release iron and phosphate (important nutrients) and provide energy for microbes.
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“Leopard spot” speckles discovered on new Martian rock samples.
Credits: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU / MSSS
NASA planetary scientists are certainly excited.
“As a rock nerd/scientist and director of NASA JPL, this is exactly the discovery I was hoping for – a mind-blowing observation that makes my heart beat just a little faster,” NASA’s Laurie Lesin wrote in a post online.
“This is not only intriguing, but truly exciting! We need to bring these samples back to Earth and analyze them in the best laboratories possible!” wrote Rosalie Lopez, senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
But of course, NASA decided to hold back on expectations until more details are known. Leopard spots could have been produced by non-biological processes, such as mineral deposition from past water flows. In their announcement, NASA included this helpful graph showing the Confidence Scale for Life Detection (CoLD): This detection puts NASA in first place.
Credit: NASA / Aaron Gronstal
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And, more importantly, scaling up would require meticulous analysis of samples (taken from a rock called Cheyaba Falls) in laboratories on Earth, which would require far more instruments than a car-sized rover could carry. This would prove whether abiotic factors actually formed the structures, whether there was life in the past, and whether it would refute other hypotheses. But NASA’s Mars Sample Return Mission is in jeopardy. The mission would cost about $11 billion, a sum the agency can’t afford. NASA is currently exploring an economically feasible plan for the complex endeavor of retrieving the samples and launching them to Earth on a rocket.
Until then, these fascinating structures will likely remain largely intact.
“We shone a laser and X-rays on the rock and took images from just about every angle imaginable, literally day and night,” said Perseverance mission scientist Ken Farley. “Scientifically, there’s nothing more Perseverance can provide. To fully understand what really happened in the Martian river valley in Jezero Crater billions of years ago, we need to bring samples of Cheyaba Falls back to Earth and study them with the powerful instruments available in our laboratories.”
