Possible traces of life found on Mars by NASA rover perseverance

The Mars rover Perseverance has discovered possible traces of life on the Red Planet. Scientists associated with the NASA mission can't hide their excitement, although they emphasize that further analysis is necessary. The clue is a fragment of rock shaped like an arrowhead found on the planet's surface.

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 microbial life billions of years ago, when Mars was significantly wetter than it is today."

The instruments with which the Perseverance rover is equipped detected organic compounds in the boulder, which are precursors to life's chemistry. Calcium sulphate 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 millimetre-sized spots, each surrounded by a black ring containing iron and phosphate. Due to chemical reactions conducted by microbes, we can observe the same phenomenon on Earth.

On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface — David Flannery, an astrobiologist and member of the Perseverance science team from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, said in a statement.

The rock being studied by the rover, which scientists have named Cheyava Falls, is located on the edge of an ancient river valley spanning 400 metres (1,300 feet) 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 containing organic compounds was deposited into the valley and later cemented into the Cheyava Falls rock, from which Perseverance collected a sample on 21 July (Greenwich Time). A second episode of water seeping into the formed rock would have created the calcium sulphate veins and black ring spots the team sees today.

"To be clear, the rock's visible features aren’t irrefutable evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars — not yet, at least. It is possible, for instance, that the observed calcium sulfate entered the rock at uninhabitably high temperatures, perhaps during a nearby volcanic event. However, whether such non-biological chemical reactions could have resulted in the observed black-ringed spots is an open question", scientists say.

We have zapped that rock with lasers and X-rays and imaged it literally day and night from just about every angle imaginable — Ken Farley, a Perseverance project scientist from Caltech in California, said in a statement. — Scientifically, Perseverance has nothing more to give — he added.

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