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NASA has revealed that its Perseverance rover may have found evidence of past life on Mars in the Jezero crater beside an ancient, dried-up river.
A rock, collected on July 21 and nicknamed “Cheyava Falls” by NASA, displays traits that may answer the question of whether Mars was home to microscopic life in the past.
According to a NASA press release, the vein-filled rock “has some indications it may have hosted microbial life billions of years ago.”
“Analysis by instruments aboard the rover indicates the rock possesses qualities that fit the definition of a possible indicator of ancient life,” NASA explained. “The rock exhibits chemical signatures and structures that could possibly have been formed by life billions of years ago when the area being explored by the rover contained running water.
“Other explanations for the observed features are being considered by the science team, and future research steps will be required to determine whether ancient life is a valid explanation.”
The rock was discovered on the northern edge of Neretva Vallis, an ancient river valley carved by water rushing into the Jezero Crater billions of years ago.
NASA/JPL-Caltech-MSSS
“We have designed the route for Perseverance to ensure that it goes to areas with the potential for interesting scientific samples,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This trip through the Neretva Vallis riverbed paid off as we found something we’ve never seen before, which will give our scientists so much to study.”
Perseverance rover’s SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instrument performed multiple scans of the rock which show that it contains organic compounds.
“These spots are a big surprise,” said David Flannery, an astrobiologist and member of the Perseverance science team from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. “On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface.”
Farley added that they have studied “Cheyava Falls” from “just about every angle imaginable,” but “to fully understand what really happened in that Martian river valley at Jezero Crater billions of years ago, we’d want to bring the Cheyava Falls sample back to Earth.”