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Space & Astronomy

Perseverance rover discovers possible signs of ancient life on Mars

By T.K. Randall
November 27, 2022 · Comment icon 24 comments

Did the Red Planet ever support primitive extraterrestrial life ? Image Credit: NASA / JPL
NASA's latest Mars rover has made a discovery that could point to the presence of life on Mars in the distant past.
Confirmation that there was once life on the Red Planet - most likely during a time in the distant past when Mars was home to rivers and oceans of liquid water - would be one of the most important scientific discoveries in the history of human civilization.

It's no surprise, then, that NASA has spent decades scouring Mars for evidence of habitability.

Its latest tool aiding in this search is Perseverance - a car-sized rover that landed on the Red Planet in 2021 and has since spent its time trundling across the surface of Jezero crater in search of clues.

Most recently, the rover has discovered evidence of organic carbon on Mars - a tantalizing find that scientists believe could be a sign of ancient microbial life.
"Organics make up life as we know it," said University of Florida astrobiologist Amy Williams.

"Seeing organic carbon on Mars sets us up to understand if the building blocks for life were present on the planet in the past through the lens of how life evolved on Earth."

As things stand, it is impossible to know for sure whether these organic molecules are the result of biological or geological processes, yet even the latter could still point to the planet's former habitability.

Whichever the case, we are sure to learn more in the next few years when NASA's Mars sample-return mission picks up caches of samples left by the rover and transports them back to Earth.

Studying these directly in a lab will be the best way to tell for sure what they could mean.

Source: University of Florida | Comments (24)




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Recent comments on this story
Comment icon #15 Posted by Freez1 1 year ago
Well it’s entirely possible I guess because after millions of years everything left behind on Mars would be mostly broken back down by now. So while their looking for carbon they should be looking for plastic.
Comment icon #16 Posted by qxcontinuum 1 year ago
The reason I opened up this article was to make a similar comment. Since 1960 we know this already. Nasa doesn't bring anything new , with every mars mission they're wishi washy the same old.  Most like the scoop is to justify another mission and get more funding if they are truly on Mars but this is a whole different topic...
Comment icon #17 Posted by jethrofloyd 1 year ago
Comment icon #18 Posted by bmk1245 1 year ago
Good one  Just remembered good ol' Carlin  
Comment icon #19 Posted by Desertrat56 1 year ago
or maybe you are remembering the future!   
Comment icon #20 Posted by Desertrat56 1 year ago
The story I heard was that the people on Mars had a horrible destructive war and some of them were able to escape annihilation by coming to earth and terraforming to fit their environment before the nukes destroyed mars.
Comment icon #21 Posted by joc 1 year ago
 Well that's not the story I made up...errr...I mean heard....
Comment icon #22 Posted by Desertrat56 1 year ago
Look up Marduke.   It is another story that the planet crashed into some other planet in our solar system and created the asteroid belt and in the process wiped the martian atmosphere out, that was a different story of how martians moved to earth.   
Comment icon #23 Posted by qxcontinuum 1 year ago
It happened when another planet located between Jupiter and Saturn exploded . Part of it was captured by Saturn forming its rings, the other was ejected in the solar system. On earth had caused the dinosaur extinction.  https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/813/nasas-cassini-data-show-saturns-rings-relatively-new "From our planet's perspective, that means Saturn's rings may have formed during the age of dinosaurs."
Comment icon #24 Posted by jethrofloyd 1 year ago


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