(NewsNation) — Organic compounds discovered on Mars could indicate the existence of life, with new findings from NASA’s Perseverance rover suggesting the presence of a diversity of them in rocks at a locale where a lake existed long ago.
According to a new study published in the scientific journal Nature, scientists found diverse types of molecules after analyzing data acquired by the Perseverance rover after landing in Mars’ Jezero crater in Feb. 2021.
The discovery could be a key piece of evidence in determining whether life exists on Mars or if it ever did exist elsewhere in the Solar System beyond Earth.
The latest evidence comes from an instrument called SHERLOC mounted on the six-wheeled rover’s robotic arm that enables a detailed mapping and analysis of organic molecules. Researchers are reporting SHERLOC’s findings from 10 places on two geological formations on the floor of the Jezero crater.
The discovery is a potential indicator of life on Mars, with new findings from NASA’s Perseverance rover suggesting the presence of a diversity of them in rocks at a locale where a lake existed long ago.
Researchers obtained evidence indicating the presence of organic molecules in multiple rock samples, including some collected for potential return to Earth for future analysis. The researchers noted that evidence of such molecules is not proof of life past or present on Mars, and that non-biological processes remain a more likely explanation.
“Organics are the molecular building blocks of life as we know it, but can also be formed from geological processes not directly related to life. We see multiple signals that appear to vary across the formations of the crater floor and in the minerals they are associated with,” said astrobiologist Sunanda Sharma of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, lead author of the research published this week in the journal Nature.
Mars has not always been the inhospitable place it is today, with liquid water on its surface in the distant past. Scientists suspect that microbial life once could have lived in the Jezero crater. They believe river channels spilled over the crater wall and created a lake more than 3.5 billion years ago.
Signals of organic molecules were detected at all 10 places that SHERLOC — short for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals — studied on the crater floor. The rocks were igneous – volcanically formed.
Signs of organic molecules were first detected on Mars in 2015 by a different rover called Curiosity, followed by more evidence in subsequent years. With Perseverance now detecting possible signatures of organic molecules, the evidence is accumulating that organic molecules may be relatively common on Mars, though at low levels.
