2023-07-14 06:49:08
More evidence is revealing “possible signs of life” on Mars, the latest of which has been found at ten sites at the bottom of Jezero Crater on the Red Planet. The new evidence was found by the Sherlock instrument on NASA’s Perseverance spacecraft, which shows the presence of “organic” particles from multiple rock samples that were collected and returned to Earth for analysis. Researchers have discovered that the evidence provided by the “organic” samples may be evidence of past or present life on Mars, but it is not final, as there are still non-biological explanations that may be likely. “Organic compounds are the partial building blocks of life as we know it, but they can form from geological processes not directly related to life,” said Sunanda Sharma, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a paper published in the scientific journal Nature. “We see multiple signals that seem to vary across the compositions of the crater bottom and in the associated minerals,” she added. The Perseverance spacecraft is conducting a mission to search for evidence of life on Mars, and it is collecting rock and soil samples with the aim of returning them for analysis on Earth. The vehicle landed on the surface of Mars, in February of 2021, at the Jezero crater, which is located in the northern half of the planet, where it is believed to have been submerged for many years by water. Scientists believe that Mars was a planet containing “microbial” life that lived in the Jezero crater, where river channels extended over the walls of the crater and created a lake 3.5 billion years ago. The Sherlock instrument uses cameras, lasers and spectrometers to analyze wavelengths of light in search of organic molecules that may be linked to microbial life in the distant past. Scientists did not specify from Sherlock’s data the exact nature of the organic components, while it is likely that they are compounds such as “benzene or naphthalene,” researcher Ryan Rubel, a chemist at the University of Pittsburgh, told Archyde.com. He added that these compounds are “common on Earth in crude oil, which has a biological origin, but we can also form them industrially through various chemical reactions.” Rubel noted that the “concentrations” shown by the Sherlock data were “lower every year … but we noticed signs associated with organic elements on almost every rock that we sampled.” Signs of the presence of organic molecules were discovered for the first time on the surface of Mars, in 2015, by the Curiosity rover, and more discoveries followed later. “There are energetic and abiotic mechanisms that can allow the formation of organic molecules, including interplanetary dust, meteorites or water interactions,” researcher Ruppel explained.
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