Scientists have announced the discovery of the most promising evidence so far on the past life on the planet Mars. NASA’s perseverance rover has found unusually marked rocks containing minerals that researchers believe would have been produced by ancient microbes.
The perseverance of NASA, on Mars Photo: Video capture
Rover, which explores Mars from 2021, cannot directly detect life, past or present. Instead, it transports a drill to penetrate the rocks to keep the samples collected from the places considered the most appropriate to host life with billions years ago. The samples are waiting to be recovered on earth, an ambitious plan that is waiting, because NASA is looking for cheaper and faster options.
“This discovery of the Perseverance Rover, launched during the first term of President Trump, is closest to discovering life on Mars. Identifying a potential biosenitis on the Red Planet is a revolutionary discovery, which will advance our understanding of Mars ”, said NASA interim administrator, Sean Duffy, for NASA.
“The NASA commitment to carry out scientific activities at the highest level will continue as we follow our goal of putting on the American foot on Mars.” he added.
The scientific instruments of the rover have found that the sedimentary rocks of the formation are composed of clay and sludge, which, on Earth, are excellent conservatives of microbial life.
They are also rich in organic carbon, sulfur, oxidized iron (rust) and phosphorus.
“The combination of chemical compounds I found in the Bright Angel formation could have been a rich energy source for microbial metabolism. But the fact that I saw all these convincing chemical signatures in the data did not mean that I had a potential biosension. We had to analyze what those data could mean“, said Joel Hurowitz, a scientist in Perseverance, Stony Brook, New York, and the main author of the article.
Janice Bishop at the Seti and Mario Parente Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst said non-biological processes could be responsible.
“This is one of the reasons why we cannot go so far as to say: Aha, this is a positive proof of the existence of life.”said the main researcher Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University
