The leopard-like features in the center of this image could be signs of ancient life.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
NASA’s Perseverance rover has discovered a rock that contains traces of ancient life. Nicknamed “Cheyava Falls” after a famous waterfall in Arizona, the rock shows hints that it may have supported living microbes billions of years ago. But for now, there’s no way to be sure if life actually existed there.
The rock is about 1m x 0.6m in size and is mostly red with thin veins of white calcium sulfate, which formed when water seeped through cracks in the rock and deposited minerals in the cracks. Water is one of the ingredients necessary for life, but it wasn’t all that researchers found when they scrutinized the Perseverance data.
They saw strange bright-colored spots between the white stripes, each a few millimeters across, surrounded by a dark substance containing iron and phosphate. “These spots are a big surprise,” he said. David Flannery From NASA at Queensland University of Technology in Australia press release“These types of rock features on Earth are often associated with the fossil record of microbes living underground,” because the types of chemical reactions that create these types of leopard spots in Earth’s rocks may also provide useful energy for microbes.
In the same area where the rocks were, Perseverance also detected certain organic compounds often thought to be building blocks of life. All of this, taken together, could be considered signs of past Martian microbes, but it’s not definitive proof. “We have to be cautiously enthusiastic, but pragmatically restrained,” he says. Paul Burn “For now, this is (probably) a sign that wet rock is undergoing chemical transformation,” says a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who was not involved in the work.
After all, there is a way to create all these signatures without any living organisms involved. And there are some indications that the area may have once been flooded with hot magma, which would have made it impossible for any life to survive there.
Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever find out for sure whether Cheyava Falls holds any signs of life. “We’ve poked at the rock with lasers and X-rays, and we’ve literally imaged it day and night from almost every angle imaginable,” he said. Ken Farley “Scientifically, Perseverance has nothing left to offer,” said a press release from the California Institute of Technology.
The rover added the Cheyava Falls sample to its archive, which is designed to be returned to Earth on a future mission. Then researchers will be able to study the sample in more detail using much more advanced instruments. “There’s nothing better than doing laboratory analysis on Earth,” Byrne said.
But NASA’s plans to return Perseverance samples from Mars have been hit by a series of setbacks over the past year or so. It’s not yet clear when — or if — we’ll get to see the intriguing rock up close.
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