NASA’s Perseverance rover may have found evidence of microbial life on Mars.
Perseverance is part of Mars 2020 mission. To know more, click on the link below.
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Source: Space.com
On Wednesday (Sept. 10), the Perseverance team announced it found possible biosignatures in pieces of a Mars rock called “Cheyava Falls” that the rover first studied last year. Those intriguing chemical fingerprints include the iron-containing minerals vivianite and greigite, which Perseverance spotted in the clay-rich sediments of a long-dry lakebed.
“The combination of these minerals, which appear to have formed by electron-transfer reactions between the sediment and organic matter, is a potential fingerprint for microbial life, which would use these reactions to produce energy for growth,” NASA officials said in a statement on Wednesday.
But ancient Red Planet microbes aren’t the only explanation for the vivianite and greigite; they can also form via geological processes, Perseverance team members stressed. And the rover alone likely won’t be able to tease out whether or not they truly are a sign of Mars life.
NASA expected Perseverance to run into this wall, so they designed the mission as a sample-return effort. Since it touched down inside Mars’ 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer-wide) Jezero Crater in February 2021, the rover has been collecting Red Planet rock and dirt and sealing the samples up in cigar-sized tubes.
The plan has long been to haul about 30 of these tubes back to Earth, where they would be studied in far greater detail than Perseverance can achieve with its limited instrument suite.
But the prospects for getting that Mars material to our planet have grown dimmer over the past few years thanks to delays, cost overruns, project redesigns and budget decisions.
The original plan was a joint NASA-European Space Agency campaign with a total maximum price tag of around $3 billion (as estimated in July 2020). The goal was to get Perseverance’s collected material to Earth by 2033.
By 2023, however, the projected cost of Mars Sample Return (MSR) had ballooned to between $8 billion and $11 billion, and the samples’ expected arrival on Earth had slipped to 2040 or so.
This was unacceptable to the top NASA brass. In April 2024, Bill Nelson, the agency’s chief at the time, announced NASA would overhaul the MSR strategy after incorporating new ideas proposed by agency research centers, academia and private industry.
By early January of this year, NASA had narrowed its options down to two potential architectures. One would use an agency-developed “sky crane” to get the MSR lander down on Mars, while the other would rely on a commercially provided landing system. (The MSR lander would sport a rocket that launches Perseverance’s samples off the Red Planet’s surface.)
Option 1 would likely cost between $6.6 billion and $7.7 billion, while Option 2 would be slightly cheaper, falling between $5.8 billion and $7.1 billion. Both could end up getting the samples to Earth by 2035, if all goes according to plan, Nelson said.
NASA planned to choose between these two alternatives by mid-2026 — but that does not appear to be in the cards anymore.
Are those rocks proof that there was life on Mars? What do you think? Write in the comments.
