An example of rock collected by NASA’s perseverance in Mars Rover may have evidence of ancient microbial life preserved in the Billions of years on the Red Planet.
The potential “biological” is not direct proof of life itself, but rather a possible sign that the features of the rock texture may have biological origin.
“This conclusion of our incredible perseverance, Rover, is the closest we really discovered ancient life on Mars,” Nicky Fox, an associate administrator of NASA’s headquarters at NASA’s headquarters, said Wednesday.
The possibility that Mars once played the preparation of living organisms was a long -term discussion of scientists and was the main focus of NASA, as broader efforts to understand the origin of life and whether humanity is one in the universe.
The sample taken from a rock known as Cheyava Falls was collected in 2024. In July, and perseverance explored the ancient dry river riverbed in the Jezero crater, a 28 -mile width pool north of Mars equator.
NASA’s perseverance Rover discovered leopard areas on reddish rocks, nicknamed Cheyava Falls Mars Jezero Crater in 2024. In July Other explanations are considered. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS)
The sedimentary rocks have been found to contain clay and sludge, as well as organic carbon, sulfur, rust (oxidized iron) and phosphorus.
The samples were particularly eye -catching because they seemed to have dark black patches similar to leopard stains.
“These texture features told us that something really interesting happened in these rocks. At a time when they were deposited, a set of chemical reactions occurred,” Joel Hurowitz said in the briefing, a planetary scientist at Stony Brook University. Hurowitz is the main author of a new document about the discovery published on Nature Wednesday.
Hurowitz said stains could be the models of minerals left by microbial life forms, which have long been consumed by organic carbon, phosphorus and other raw ingredients on a rock as a source of energy.
“When we see such traits in sediments on Earth, these minerals are often the by -product of microbial metabolisms that use organic matter, and these reactions make these minerals,” he added.
Coal and phosphorus are the main ingredients of molecules, important for life, including DNA.
Although the investigations have been reviewed, the findings will require detailed further investigations to confirm or deny a possible biological dispute, NASA officials said.
For example, previous statements faced skepticism. Ancient Mars meteorite found in Antarctica in 1984. Later, studies found that the organic material of space rock did not have biological origin, and instead of developing through the geological interaction of rock and water.
So far, Hurowitz and his colleagues are limited by further analysis they can do remotely with a set of perseverance with a set of instruments. However, the Rover mission was originally created to collect several rock samples that will eventually be returned to the ground to future missions to perform further analysis.
However, these goals can be in danger.
President Donald Trump’s draft budget, published in May, urged a deep reduction in NASA, and reduced the space agency’s budget by approximately 25%or more than $ 6 billion. The proposed reductions included the termination of the NASA MARS sample return program, which provided several missions in conjunction with the European Space Agency to recover the examples collected by the perseverance.
NASA, an administrator Sean Duffy, said on Wednesday that officials would review the scope of missions and their schedules before deciding on the fate of Mars’ samples.
“We believe that there is a better way to do this – a faster way to recover these examples,” Duffy said. “And this is the analysis we have survived. Can we do it faster? Can we do it cheaper? And we think we can.”
The “perseverance Rover” was released to Mars in 2020. And spent more than three years exploring the floor of Jezero Crater, before starting a long and upright march to the western edge of the crater.
This article was originally published in nbcnews.com