That NASA conveque without warning a press conference related to Rover Perseverance can only mean that it has found something interesting. And indeed, that is what the acting administrator of the NASA, Sean Duffy, has announced today. What, I quote textually, “could be one of the clearest signs of life we have seen on Mars.”
Short. The scientific community has finished analyzing A rock with a leopard spots pattern that NASA’s Perseverance Rover found on Mars in July last year. A complete study Posted in Nature magazine It confirms that the surface of the rock has a combination of chemical, mineral and textural characteristics that are difficult to explain without, at least consider the intervention of biology.
Although scientists cannot confirm it without physical access to the rock, It could be the first biofirma found on Mars. That is, a geochemical characteristic that is associated with microbial life on earth and that, casually, has been found in a place where water ran.
Cheyava Falls. The epicenter of this finding is an area of the edges of the Marciano Jezero crater baptized as Bright Angel, an old river bed about 400 meters wide. It was here that, in July 2024, the Rover Perseverance ran into a rock -shaped rock of approximately one meter long that was baptized by NASA scientists as “Cheyava Falls”.
The analysis of this rock has revealed some tiny structures to which researchers refer, colloquially, as “poppy seeds” and “leopard spots.” They are not simple rocks with curious shapes, they are the product of chemical reactions. Poppy seeds are nodules between 100 and 200 microns, probably a mineral called Vivianita, and leopard spots are the reaction fronts: more complex structures of up to 1 mm with a dark edge of Vivianita and a clearer core rich in iron sulfide, probably of Greigita.
What is special. The truly interesting thing about these mineral structures is that they are next to organic carbon, detected by the Perseverance Sherloc instrument through its spectral Band G.
To understand the striking of this finding, you just have to see what causes these structures on Earth. And yes, microbial life is an option. “On Earth, sometimes things are formed in sediments where microbes eat organic matter and ‘breathe’ oxide and sulfate”, explains the geobiologist Michael TiceProfessor of the University of Texas A&M and co -author of the study.
They were the microbes. Oxide-reduction reactions (better known as redox) start from electron transfer, which is a fundamental process for living beings to obtain energy. Therefore, an option is the biological scenario: microorganisms that lived in the mud of an old Marciano Lake more than 3,000 million years ago caused these structures.
As? They used organic matter as food. When “breathing”, they used oxidized iron and sediment sulfate as electrons acceptors, producing the reduced iron minerals that we see today: the vivianita and the greek. This process occurs at low temperatures and perfectly explains the combination and disposition of minerals and organic matter.
Not so fast. Purely geochemical processes, without biological intervention, could also have created these structures. Organic matter (which can have a non -biological origin, such as a meteorite) was also able to react with rock minerals.
But in this abiotic scenario there is a problem. The reactions that the Vivianita form can occur at low temperatures, and the geochemical processes known to form the Greigite from sulfate require very high temperatures (greater than 150-200 ° C) or very acidic. Bright Angel’s rocks show no evidence of having experienced either.
The definitive test? Not far, but a promising first step. Perseverance instruments are powerful, but it has its limits. The rover drilled the rock “Cheyava Falls and stored a nucleus, nicknamed” Sapphire Canyon “, in a sealed sampling tube. It is one of the 27 tubes that the rover has filled to date and one of the highest candidates to be brought to the earth, where a much more exhaustive analysis could be done.
This is where emotion collides with reality. The Mars Sample Return mission, designed to collect these samples and bring them home, is de facto canceled after the original mission budget was shot up to 11,000 million dollars with delays until 2040. The situation has forced NASA to look for faster and cheaper alternatives. That is, to ask for alternative proposals to the private industry and the JPL. But there is still no defined path.
The cake widge. There is another surprising factor that raises the importance of this discovery. Until now, the dominant hypothesis suggested that possible signs of life should be sought in the oldest rocks of Mars. However, Bright Angel’s lodolites are among the younger sedimentary rocks that the mission has investigated. This opens a new and fascinating possibility: that Mars could have been habitable for a longer period of time or at a later stage in its history of what was thought.
Image | NASA, JPL
That NASA conveque without warning a press conference related to Rover Perseverance can only mean that it has found something interesting. And indeed, that is what the acting administrator of the NASA, Sean Duffy, has announced today. What, I quote textually, “could be one of the clearest signs of life we have seen on Mars.”
Short. The scientific community has finished analyzing A rock with a leopard spots pattern that NASA’s Perseverance Rover found on Mars in July last year. A complete study Posted in Nature magazine It confirms that the surface of the rock has a combination of chemical, mineral and textural characteristics that are difficult to explain without, at least consider the intervention of biology.
Although scientists cannot confirm it without physical access to the rock, it could be the first biofirm found on Mars. That is, a geochemical characteristic that is associated with microbial life on earth and that, casually, has been found in a place where water ran.
Cheyava Falls. The epicenter of this finding is an area of the edges of the Marciano Jezero crater baptized as Bright Angel, an old river bed about 400 meters wide. It was here that, in July 2024, the Rover Perseverance ran into a rock -shaped rock of approximately one meter long that was baptized by NASA scientists as “Cheyava Falls”.
The analysis of this rock has revealed some tiny structures to which researchers refer, colloquially, as “poppy seeds” and “leopard spots.” They are not simple rocks with curious shapes, they are the product of chemical reactions. Poppy seeds are nodules between 100 and 200 microns, probably a mineral called Vivianita, and leopard spots are the reaction fronts: more complex structures of up to 1 mm with a dark edge of Vivianita and a clearer core rich in iron sulfide, probably of Greigita.
What is special. The truly interesting thing about these mineral structures is that they are next to organic carbon, detected by the Perseverance Sherloc instrument through its spectral Band G.
To understand the striking of this finding, you just have to see what causes these structures on Earth. And yes, microbial life is an option. “On Earth, sometimes things are formed in sediments where microbes eat organic matter and ‘breathe’ oxide and sulfate”, explains the geobiologist Michael TiceProfessor of the University of Texas A&M and co -author of the study.
They were the microbes. Oxide-reduction reactions (better known as redox) start from electron transfer, which is a fundamental process for living beings to obtain energy. Therefore, an option is the biological scenario: microorganisms that lived in the mud of an old Marciano Lake more than 3,000 million years ago caused these structures.
As? They used organic matter as food. When “breathing”, they used oxidized iron and sediment sulfate as electrons acceptors, producing the reduced iron minerals that we see today: the vivianita and the greek. This process occurs at low temperatures and perfectly explains the combination and disposition of minerals and organic matter.
Not so fast. Purely geochemical processes, without biological intervention, could also have created these structures. Organic matter (which can have a non -biological origin, such as a meteorite) was also able to react with rock minerals.
But in this abiotic scenario there is a problem. The reactions that the Vivianita form can occur at low temperatures, and the geochemical processes known to form the Greigite from sulfate require very high temperatures (greater than 150-200 ° C) or very acidic. Bright Angel’s rocks show no evidence of having experienced either.
The definitive test? Not far, but a promising first step. Perseverance instruments are powerful, but it has its limits. The rover drilled the rock “Cheyava Falls and stored a nucleus, nicknamed” Sapphire Canyon “, in a sealed sampling tube. It is one of the 27 tubes that the rover has filled to date and one of the highest candidates to be brought to the earth, where a much more exhaustive analysis could be done.
This is where emotion collides with reality. The Mars Sample Return mission, designed to collect these samples and bring them home, It is de facto canceled After the original mission budget was triggered up to 11,000 million dollars with delays until 2040. The situation has forced NASA to look for faster and cheaper alternatives. That is, to ask for alternative proposals to the private industry and the JPL. But there is still no defined path.
The cake widge. There is another surprising factor that raises the importance of this discovery. Until now, the dominant hypothesis suggested that possible signs of life should be sought in the oldest rocks of Mars. However, Bright Angel’s lodolites are among the younger sedimentary rocks that the mission has investigated. This opens a new and fascinating possibility: that Mars was habitable for a longer period of time or at a later stage of its history of what was thought.
Image | NASA, JPL
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