NASA’s Perseverance rover venturing into the alien world has found an incredible treasure trove of life.
A new analysis by Imperial College London (ICL, part of the University of London – UK) based on a type of rock found by Perseverance at the bottom of the giant Jezero crater on Mars has simultaneously demonstrated the interaction between rocks and liquid water, as well as organic compounds.
Jezero Crater has long been thought to be a domain of ancient alien life. Previous evidence based on NASA remote sensing data showed that this giant impact crater may have once contained an entire river delta. Perseverance’s mission is to find evidence to confirm this.
Perhaps it would have had another success. According to Professor Mark Sephton from ICL’s Department of Earth Sciences and Engineering, a member of the Perseverance research team, the floor of Jezero Crater is where this rover landed for safety reasons before moving into the delta.
At the bed of this lake, scientists expected to find and sample only a few layers of sediment, but were surprised to find cooled magma there, with minerals that registered significant contact with water, using a state-of-the-art scanning device called SHERLOC, mounted on the arm of the Perseverance self-propelled robot rover.
These minerals, such as carbonates and salts, require water to circulate through the volcanic rock, creating cavities and depositing dissolved minerals in pores and cracks.
And like the cavity-filled rocks in Earth’s oceans, where tiny creatures choose to take refuge, these cavities also contain remains of organic matter.
This raises the possibility that it could be evidence of ancient Martian creatures that once swam in the water, which scientists will need time to examine further.
The work, funded by NASA, the European Research Council, the Swedish National Space Agency and the British Space Agency, has just been published in the journal Science.
