Rock discovery contains ‘clearest sign’ yet of ancient life on Mars, NASA says

NASA said on Wednesday that scientists think fascinating Rock discovery leopard patches on a rock sampled by the Perseverance rover on Mars last year might have been created by ancient life. Although they claim more research is necessary, the team has also published a peer-reviewed publication describing the new analysis in the journal Nature.

Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy stated, “After a year of review, they came back and said, listen, we can’t find another explanation.” “This is really exciting because it may be the most obvious indication of life on Mars that we have ever discovered.

The Perseverance rover gathered the sample, known as Sapphire Canyon, from rocky outcrops on the borders of the Neretva Vallis river valley, an area sculpted by water that originally flowed into Jezero Crater over three billion years ago. In February 2021, the rover landed inside the crater to investigate the site of the old lake, looking for rocks that had previously been formed or altered by water on Mars.

In July 2024, Perseverance drilled the Sapphire Canyon sample from Cheyava Falls, an arrowhead-shaped rock.

Scientists have been fascinated by the rock because it may provide insight into whether microscopic life ever existed on the red planet, even tho the sample is securely tucked away in a tube millions of miles away on Mars.

“We’re sharing with you all today the discovery of a potential biosignature, or a feature or signature that could be consistent with biological processes, but that requires further work and study to confirm a biological origin. This is the result of years of hard work, dedication, and collaboration between over 1,000 scientists and engineers here at the (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory and our partner institutions around the country and internationally,” stated Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance project scientist at JPL, at a press conference on Wednesday.

Members of the Perseverance science team reported shortly after the rock was discovered that it was precisely the kind of boulder they were looking for. At the end of July 2024, NASA first announced the rock discovery at Cheyava Falls.

According to main study author Joel Hurowitz, a planetary scientist at Stony Brook University in fresh York, the fresh revelation on Wednesday is the outcome of a protracted, peer-reviewed research process and the gathering of more data.

According to Lindsay Hays, senior scientist for Mars Exploration at NASA’s Planetary Science Division, peer review and publication are essential steps in the scientific process that enable NASA to make the mission data and the science team’s interpretation of that data available to the larger scientific community for further study.

“Hopefully, this will eventually be followed by the delivery of these samples back to Earth where they could be studied in terrestrial labs,” Hays continued.

After locating the sample, the Perseverance rover investigated the river valley to learn more about the environment in which the rocks were deposited and to figure out how the leopard spots might have formed, according to Hurowitz.

Determining whether the rock has evidence of a potential biosignature requires understanding how those areas came to be, whether thru microbial life or thru geochemical processes that don’t require life.

“Today, we are truly demonstrating to you how we are getting closer to providing an answer to one of humanity’s most important questions: Are we really alone in the universe?” According to Nicky Fox, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate of NASA.

Investigating Cheyava Falls

According to Stack Morgan, the Neretva Vallis would have been filled with swift rivers that carried gravel, sand, and muck into the lake about 3.5 billion years ago.

“This type of energetic setting inside the crater was probably punctuated by periods of calm when water would have backed up, creating a relatively low energy lake environment,” she continued.

The rocky outcrop known as Bright Angel, where Cheyava Valls was discovered, was left behind when the water ultimately dried up, leaving a record of a “potential habitable environment” on Mars, according to Stack Morgan.

“These extremely old rocks give us a window into a time when life was emergent on Earth and may have been on Mars as well, but it’s not particularly well represented on our own planet Earth,” she continued.

Named for one of the Grand Canyon’s waterfalls, Cheyava Falls included both larger marks called leopard spots and tiny black patches called “poppy seeds” by Perseverance’s science team.

According to Hurowitz, “these textural features told us that something really interesting had happened in these rocks, some chemical reactions occurred at the time they were being deposited.

Organic chemicals were also found in the rock by the rover’s SHERLOC instrument, which stands for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals.

According to Hurowitz, the SHERLOC data were a “smoking gun indicator for the presence of organic matter in this mud.” In the Bright Angel formation, organic compounds were also discovered in a few additional places.

Hurowitz stated, “This indicates that we had a rusty red mud that was deposited in the presence of organic matter.

These carbon-based compounds are the fundamental components of life on Earth. The rock’s mottling may be a sign that microbial species were once nourished by ancient chemical reactions taking place within it.

Water, which is essential for life, formerly flowed throughout the rock, as evidenced by white veins of calcium sulfate. Additionally, the rover’s PIXL instrument—short for Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry—found iron and phosphate in the irregular-shaped leopard spots.

Between the white streaks of calcium sulfate in the rock, the researchers also noticed what might be hematite. One of the minerals that gives Mars its distinctive red color is hematite. The leopard spotting might have happened when hematite underwent chemical reactions that changed the rock’s color from red to white. This could have released iron and phosphate, which could have led to the formation of the black rings. Microbes may also be able to obtain energy from such reactions.

The researchers believe that the characteristics are probably caused by the minerals vivianite and greigite, or ferrous iron phosphate and iron sulfide. These minerals usually form in low-temperature, water-filled settings.

According to a statement from the study’s coauthor, Dr. Michael Tice, a geobiologist and astrobiologist in the geology and geophysics department at Texas A&M University, “things like these sometimes form in sediments where microbes are eating organic matter and ‘breathing’ rust and sulfate.” “The question of whether similar processes could have taken place on Mars is raised by their presence there.

Getting proof of life

The authors of the study examine two possible explanations for the formation of the rock features: either life was there or it was not.

Although reactions between organic materials and iron could form some of the patterns purely geochemically, that process typically only occurs at quite high temperatures, which the team does not detect evidence of, according to Tice.

“Every method we have for analyzing these rocks on the rover indicates that they were never heated in a way that could produce the poppy seeds and leopard spots,” Tice clarified. “If that’s the case, we have to take seriously the possibility that they were created more than three billion years ago by organisms like bacteria that lived in the mud of a Martian lake.

According to the research, Cheyava Falls may have started out as a mixture of organic substances and deposited mud that later solidified to create granite. The calcium sulfate veins and rock discovery leopard patches may have been formed later by water seeping via rock fissures and depositing minerals.

According to Hurowitz, “what’s exciting about these finds, this sort of combination of mud and organic matter that has reacted to produce these minerals and these textures, is that we see features like these are often the byproduct of microbial metabolisms that are consuming organic matter and making these minerals as a result of those reactions.

Hurowitz also admitted that characteristics like leopard spots can be produced in nonbiological methods.

“What we need to do from here is to continue doing additional research in laboratory settings here on Earth, and ultimately bring the sample from this rock back home to Earth so that we can finally determine what process actually gave rise to these fantastic textures,” he stated.

Although researchers are still examining the sample’s geologic setting, the new study provides a summary of their current understanding of the Cheyava Falls rock, according to Stack Morgan. Over the course of the next year or so, further papers are anticipated.

“We essentially threw the entire rover science payload at this rock while we were exploring the Bright Angel area, so we’re pretty close to the limits of what the rover can do on the surface in terms of making progress on that particular question,” Stack Morgan stated.

Perseverance has traversed Jezero Crater and investigated an old river delta since arriving on Mars in an effort to find microfossils of extinct life. Along the way, the rover has been gathering samples that were meant to be sent back to Earth by subsequent expeditions.

However, as NASA struggles with the White House’s intention to cut NASA’s science funding by as much as half, it is now unclear how the agency will return the samples to Earth.

Duffy stated, “We’re looking at how we get the sample back, or other samples back.” “What we’re going to do is examine our schedules and budgets to see how we can spend money more efficiently and what technologies we have to return samples faster. Thus, it is a contemporary analysis that is taking place at the moment.

Returning the samples is essential, according to experts, in order to finally address the question of whether life has ever lived on the red planet.

“We would be able to analyze this sample with instruments far more sensitive than anything we can send to Mars if we brought it back to Earth,” Tice stated. The idea that life may have used some of the same processes on Earth and Mars at around the same time is exciting. Seeing them like this on a different planet is a unique and amazing experience.