Did NASA Scientists Discover Possible Evidence Of Ancient Life On Mars?

Evidence collected by NASA’s Perseverance Rover, launched to Mars in 2020, suggests the possible existence of ancient life on the Red Planet.  The discovery, if verified, would be the first confirmation of life beyond the planet Earth.

After a year if review, scientists believe the leopard spots on rocks observed near a location called the Neretva Vallis river valley (which shows geological signs of large bodies of flowing water) are the potential remains of microscopic organisms.  The rover targeted a rock outcropping called the “Bright Angel” formation which proved to be a viable site.

The rover’s science instruments found that the formation’s sedimentary rocks are composed of clay and silt, which, on Earth, are excellent preservers of past microbial life. They also are rich in organic carbon, sulfur, oxidized iron (rust), and phosphorous. 

“The combination of chemical compounds we found in the Bright Angel formation could have been a rich source of energy for microbial metabolisms,” said Perseverance scientist Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University, “But just because we saw all these compelling chemical signatures in the data didn’t mean we had a potential biosignature. We needed to analyze what that data could mean.”

NASA’s team of scientists carefully reviewed the data over the course of a year.   

“After a year of review, they have come back and they said, listen, we can’t find another explanation,” said Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy. “So this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting.” 

“The discovery of a potential biosignature, or a feature or signature that could be consistent with biological processes, but that requires further work and study to confirm a biological origin is something that we’re sharing with you all today that grows from years of hard work, dedication and collaboration between over 1,000 scientists and engineers here at the (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory and our partner institutions around the country and internationally,” said Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance project scientist at JPL, during a news conference Wednesday.

The new announcement Wednesday is the result of a long, peer-reviewed research process and the collection of more data, said lead study author Joel Hurowitz, a planetary scientist at Stony Brook University in New York. 

Similar announcements of possible life on Mars have occurred since the very beginning of exploration.  In 1976 the Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers took soil samples which yielded positive readings of microbial activity, but the evidence was later deemed “ambiguous”.  

In 1996 a team of NASA scientists claimed to have found microscopic fossils of living organisms 4 billion years old in a Mars meteorite, but the data was labeled inconclusive due to suspicions of contamination.

At one time, billions of years ago, Mars may have had very similar environmental and atmospheric conditions to the Earth, with all the necessary ingredients to feed living organisms.  The long running theory is that Mars lost it’s magnetic field and solar winds destroyed it’s atmosphere, though this claim remains unproven.  The events that led to Mars becoming a vast scorched red desert are still a mystery.