NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance has detected the highest concentration of organic molecules to date, which could indicate the presence of microbes in ancient times, and scientists can’t wait to welcome rock samples back to Earth to confirm.
While organic matter has also been found on Mars in the past, the new discovery is considered particularly promising because it comes from an area in a lake where sediment and salt are deposited, conditions that could be favorable for life to emerge, Agence France-Presse reported.
“In all fairness, these will be or have been the most valuable we’ve ever collected,” David Shuster, a NASA scientist who will study samples retrieved from Perseverance, told reporters at a briefing. rock samples.”
Organic molecules are compounds composed primarily of carbon, often including hydrogen and oxygen, but sometimes other elements, not always produced by biological processes.
Further analysis and conclusions will have to wait until the Mars Sample Return mission, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to bring back rock samples, scheduled for 2033.
The Perseverance Mars rover, nicknamed “Percy”, landed in the Jezero Crater on Mars in February 2021. Its main mission is to collect signs that may contain ancient life or with Martian geological, A sample of past climate characteristics.
The delta Perseverance is exploring was formed 3.5 billion years ago, and it is currently surveying sedimentary rocks there, which are formed from grains of various sizes that were deposited in the then aqueous environment.
Perseverance collected two samples from a 1-meter-wide rock known as Wildcat Ridge, and on July 20 polished off some of its surface and analyzed it with ultraviolet spectroscopy.
The analysis revealed a class of organic molecules called aromatics, which play a key role in biochemistry.
▲Perseverance collects rock samples at “Wildcat Ridge”. (Image via facebook.com/NASAPersevere).
“It’s a scavenger hunt for potential signs of life on other planets,” said NASA astrobiologist Sunanda Sharma. “Organics is a clue, and the clues we get are getting stronger and stronger … I personally think that these The results were very moving, it felt like we were in the right place with the right tool at a very critical moment.”
Other tantalizing clues about the possibility of life have been found on Mars in the past, such as the repeated detection of methane by Curiosity, the predecessor of the Perseverance rover. However, while methane is a by-product of microbial digestion on Earth, it can also be produced by thermal reactions that do not involve living organisms.