NASA has found “the clearest sign yet” that life once existed on Mars, the agency announced on Wednesday.
After a three-decade search of the Red Planet yielded nothing but false starts and red herrings, scientists announced they had discovered potential signs of ancient microbial life encased in a sample of rocks collected by the Mars Perseverance rover last summer.
The samples, which were collected in the Nertva Vallis, an ancient river valley in the Jezero Crater formed around 3.7 billion years ago, are said to contain unusual spots and seed-like shapes, which could point to the existence of lifeforms that lived in the area in the distant past.
They were found after the rover’s tools detected trace amounts of iron and phosphorus in the ground, which can form when microbes break down tiny quantities of organic matter, as they do on Earth.
“This is the kind of signature that we would see that was made by something biological,” NASA’s associate administrator Nick Fox explained during Wednesday’s press conference.
Meanwhile, Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said, “This finding by Perseverance, launched under President Trump in his first term, is the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars.
“The identification of a potential biosignature on the Red Planet is a groundbreaking discovery, and one that will advance our understanding of Mars.
“NASA’s commitment to conducting Gold Standard Science will continue as we pursue our goal of putting American boots on Mars’ rocky soil.”
Yet despite the promising signs, scientists have been keen to point out that the signs of life may still be non-biological, and won’t be confirmed until they return to Earth for testing.
“That’s part of the reason why we can’t go so far as to say, ‘A-ha, this is proof positive of life,” lead researcher Joel Hurowitz told the Associated Press. “All we can say is one of the possible explanations is microbial life, but there could be other ways to make this set of features that we see.”
He added, “It would be amazing to be able to demonstrate conclusively that these features were formed by something that was alive on another planet billions of years ago, right? But even if that’s not the case, it’s a valuable lesson in all of the ways that nature can conspire to fool us.”
The Perseverance rover, which has been roaming the surface of Mars since 2021, cannot directly detect life. Instead, it travels to areas most likely to have sustained organisms billions of years ago and drills for samples.
As the rover cannot travel back to Earth, the samples are expected to remain on Mars until either human or robotic astronauts touch down on the surface to collect them, a prospect which is expected to cost around $11 billion and take at least another 20 years to accomplish.
In the meantime, scientists will have to rely on Earthly stand-ins and lab experiments to determine if we truly have conclusively proved that extraterrestrial life once existed in our solar system.
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