Is There Life on Mars? This Rock May Hold the Answer

This rock can contain proof of life on Mars

By Humberto Basilio Edited by Lee Billings

The most exciting rock to be supposed to be found on Mars – a piece of speckled mudstone which can simply contain evidence of an old extraterrestrial life – is always excited.

Teased last year in a preliminary announcement of NASA, this is the official conclusion of an article evaluated by peers, published today in NatureThis brings a deeper analysis of the curious outcrop. If it was found on earth instead of March, the spots of the rock would probably be interpreted as proof of a microbial food frenzy that occurred a long time ago. But obtaining a certainty of what this rock really contains probably requires transporting it from the red planet and putting it back on earth – an ambitious multi -phase mission that NASA calls the return of the mars’s sample.

The rock in question is filled with organic carbon – another promising prior condition for life – and is in a lithic training called Bright Angel, which is exposed along a channel called Neretva Vallis. There are eons, this dry canal was a river valley, formed by the rushing water and the diet of a lake and delta system in what is now known as Jezero crater. These apparently hot and humid origins have led NASA to target Jezero as an landing point for the perseverance of the space agency, which explores the site for any signs past or present of life since it approached in 2021.

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“This result gives us reasons to consider the possibility that Mars has the host of microbial life,” explains the co-author of the new study, Joel Hurowitz, geoscientist at Stony Brook University. Although this is not very close to directly, replacing the evidence of Martian life, Hurowitz and his team hope that the results help scientists “make progress in our quest to understand if there is life on other planets in the solar system and beyond”.

After the first initial NASA teaser, scientists who were impatient of more information paid particular attention to a Hurowitz presentation in mid-March at the Lunar and Planetary Science conference in Woodlands, Tex. As larger plates with dark tones and clearer centers, which they call “leopard stains”. They called the rock itself “Cheyava Falls”.

Using several instruments on perseverance, early analysis has shown that poppy seeds and leopard spots were enriched with iron and phosphorus, while the centers of leopard spots had abundant iron and sulfur. This distribution of elements indicates the two types of plates forming from organic carbon reacting with iron and sulfate minerals – a process which, on earth, is generally launched by certain types of microbes to feed their metabolism. But this can also occur abiotically via chemical reactions that occur at high temperatures.

In their Nature Study, Hurowitz and his co-authors explain the probable mineralogical composition of the Cheyava falls and his spots, as well as on the conditions in which he probably formed. The measures of perseverance suggested that the spots contain the vivianity minerals, an iron phosphate and the greigite, an iron sulfide – and which were formed in close association with organic carbon. On earth, vivianitis is frequently formed in coastal lakes and sediments where microbes use iron in their metabolism. Greigitis tends to form when microbes decompose sulfate. When they are found together on earth, these minerals and organic molecules are generally considered as a kind of biosignature, a physical sign of past or present life – at least if they can be demonstrated as having formed at low temperature rather than via warmer and less user -friendly conditions.

THE Nature The study therefore details more in-depth analyzes which suggest an origin at low temperature for spots-that is to say that they seem to have occurred in relatively clever conditions near the surface, where life could possibly prosper, rather than the inhospitable depths of the Martian subsoil. “We believe that these characteristics occurred at the beginning of the life of the sediment, shortly after being deposited and probable before it is” lithified “to form Hard Rock,” explains Hurowitz.

The team continues to call the Speckles a sign of life, however, preferring the more cautious label of “potential biosigenature”. It is unlikely that additional evidence for or against a possibly biological origin arrive at less and until NASA brings back a sample of the rock on earth for more in -depth studies. In July 2024, perseverance brought together such a specimen of the rock – a basic sample nicknamed “Sapphire Canyon” – but the besieged plan of several billion dollars of NASA to bring this budget and other samples on earth is far from being sure this year.

“These results are super exciting,” explains Janice Bishop, planetary scientist of the SETI Institute, who tested chemical reactions using analog Martian rocks and co-writes a comment that accompanies the new Nature paper. In order for life to be formed, she explains, reactions involving organic matter is necessary to build amino acids and other simple but crucial molecules. These reactions between substances also demonstrate energy sources that could have been used by early microorganisms. “There is no evidence of microbes or other forms of life on Mars, but our research is just beginning,” explains Bishop.

However, because these March rocks have billions of years, says Bishop, which offers an abundant time in which the spots could have emerged from abiotic processes: small pockets of reduced vivianite and sulfides in the ancient mudstones at Jezero Crater could have been formed long ago rather than chemical micro-reactions at the origin of organic chemical reactions or other sources.

More than once, scientists have said they found life on Mars on the basis of fragmentary evidence – and each time until now, these affirmations have finally been rejected as erroneous interpretations of fully abiotic phenomena. Time will tell us if this last case is part of this same trend – or a real new discovery.

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