The ‘clearest sign of life on Mars’ yet has been discovered, Nasa revealed today.
The US space agency has spent three decades combing the rust-red desert of our cosmic neighbour for signs of life, only to find red herrings.
Many of these could be explained away, such as dusty rocks that look like faces or soil that has strange chemistry.
But Nasa’s Perseverance robotic rover has discovered minerals on rocks on the red planet that one of the ‘only explanations’ for them is aliens.
Not quite little green men, but microbial life.
A Nasa spokesperson said today at a press conference: ‘This could very well be the clearest sign of life we’ve ever found on Mars, which is certainly exciting.’
Microbes, as they wriggle around on rocks, can create minerals as they gobble up chemicals, leaving behind minerals.
Perseverance discovered the groovy rock on an outcrop of dried mud along the Neretva Vallis last July. The quarter-mile-long river once flowed into the Jezero Crater.
The rover drilled into this outcrop of clay rock, known as the Bright Angel formation, to collect samples.
According to a paper published today in the journal Nature, the sample has features reminiscent of what microbes would have left behind when the region was warm and wet billions of years ago.
The 350billion-year-old mudstone, named Cheyava Falls, is covered in specks a few thousandths of an inch wide that contain two minerals.
One is vivianite, an iron phosphate often found in lakes and marshlands as a byproduct of microbes eating organic matter.
They also unearthed greigite, an iron sulphide, which some microbial life on Earth produces, according to the mineral catalogue, Mindat.
Both could be ‘biosignatures’ – something that might have a biological origin.
But researchers stressed that this is a very early result and that more research is needed to say that the rock is evidence of Martians.
For one, the specimen is still on Mars – Nasa needs to bring the samples back to Earth.
The ingredients in this mud could also have made the minerals through chemical reactions, they admit.
Matthew Cook, the head of space exploration at the UK Space Agency, told Metro: ‘This exciting discovery represents a significant step forward in our understanding of Mars and the potential for ancient life beyond Earth.
‘The chemical signatures identified in these Martian rocks are the first of their kind to potentially reflect biological processes that we see on Earth and provide more compelling evidence that Mars may have once harboured the conditions necessary for microbial life.’
Cook cautioned that the specimen isn’t proof of extraterrestrial life but said the findings are ‘promising’.
‘The upcoming Rosalind Franklin Mars rover mission, built here in the UK, will be crucial in helping us answer whether samples similar to those observed in this study represent genuine biological processes, bringing us closer to answering: are we alone in the universe?’ he added.
For people like Mark Christopher Lee, a film-maker and UFO investigator, today’s announcement was exciting, to say the least.
‘Proof of microbial life is Nasa’s first release of the truth about UFOs and the existence of alien life in the universe, in my opinion.’ he told Metro.
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