The explorer venturing into NASA’s Perseverance alien world has discovered an astonishing treasure of life.
New analysis from the Imperial College London (ICL) based on a type of rock found by Perseverance at the bottom of the Jezero Crater on Mars has revealed simultaneous interactions between rock, liquid water, and organic compounds.
Jezero Crater has long been considered a realm of ancient extraterrestrial life. Previous evidence based on NASA’s remote sensing data suggested that this massive impact crater may have once contained an entire river delta. Perseverance’s mission is to find authentic evidence of that.
A photo of the Martian world captured during the exploration of Jezero Crater – (Image: Perseverance/NASA/ASU).
It appears to have achieved another success. According to Professor Mark Sephton from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at ICL, a member of the Perseverance research team, the bottom of Jezero Crater is where this exploratory robot landed for safety reasons before moving to the plains.
Within this lake bed, scientists initially intended to find and sample certain sediment layers but were surprised to discover cooled magma, with minerals indicating significant interaction with water through an advanced scanning device called SHERLOC, mounted on the arm of the Perseverance rover.
These minerals, such as carbonates and salts, require water to circulate through volcanic rock, creating cavities and depositing dissolved minerals in the pores and cracks.
Just like similar porous rocks in Earth’s oceans—where tiny organisms choose to shelter—these cavities also contain remnants of organic matter.
This leads to the possibility that this could be evidence of ancient Martian life forms that once swam in water, which scientists will need time to further investigate.
The work, funded by NASA, the European Research Council, the Swedish National Space Agency, and the UK Space Agency, has just been published in the journal Science.
