{"id":14631,"date":"2025-09-10T20:46:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T20:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/14631\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T20:46:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T20:46:10","slug":"mars-rover-finds-strongest-hints-yet-of-potential-signs-of-ancient-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/14631\/","title":{"rendered":"Mars rover finds strongest hints yet of potential signs of ancient life"},"content":{"rendered":"

NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance has uncovered rocks in a dry river channel that may hold potential signs of ancient microscopic life, scientists reported overnight. <\/p>\n

They stressed that in-depth analysis is needed of the sample gathered there by Perseverance \u2014 ideally in labs on Earth \u2014 before reaching any conclusions.<\/p>\n

While acknowledging the latest analysis “certainly is not the final answer,\u201d NASA’s science mission chief Nicky Fox said it\u2019s \u201dthe closest we’ve actually come to discovering ancient life on Mars”.<\/p>\n

Roaming Mars since 2021, the rover cannot directly detect life, past or present. Instead, it carries a drill to penetrate rocks and tubes to hold the samples gathered from places judged most suitable for hosting life billions of years ago. The samples are awaiting retrieval to Earth \u2014 an ambitious plan that’s on hold as NASA seeks cheaper, quicker options.<\/p>\n

Calling it an “exciting discovery,” a pair of scientists who were not involved in the study \u2014 SETI Institute’s Janice Bishop and the University of Massachusetts Amherst\u2019s Mario Parente \u2014 were quick to point out that non-biological processes could be responsible.<\/p>\n

“That\u2019s part of the reason why we can’t go so far as to say, ‘A-ha, this is proof positive of life’,” lead researcher Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University told The Associated Press. “All we can say is one of the possible explanations is microbial life, but there could be other ways to make this set of features that we see.”<\/p>\n

\"This<\/p>\n

This image provided by NASA shows the 360-degree view of a region on Mars called \u201cBright Angel,\u201d captured on June 12, 2024 by NASA\u2019s Perseverance Mars rover. (Source: Associated Press)<\/p>\n

Either way, Hurowitz said it’s the best, most compelling candidate yet in the rover’s search for potential signs of long-ago life. It was the 25th sample gathered; the tally is now up to 30. The findings appeared in the journal Nature.<\/p>\n

“It would be amazing to be able to demonstrate conclusively that these features were formed by something that was alive on another planet billions of years ago, right?” Hurowitz said. But even if that’s not the case, it’s “a valuable lesson in all of the ways that nature can conspire to fool us.”<\/p>\n

Collected last summer, the sample is from reddish, clay-rich mudstones in Neretva Vallis, a river channel that once carried water into Jezero Crater. This outcrop of sedimentary rock, known as the Bright Angel formation, was surveyed by Perseverance\u2019s science instruments before the drill came out.<\/p>\n

Along with organic carbon, a building block of life, Hurowitz and his team found minuscule specks, dubbed poppy seeds and leopard spots, that were enriched with iron phosphate and iron sulfide. On Earth, these chemical compounds are the by-products when microorganisms chomp down on organic matter.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no evidence of microbes on Mars today, but if any had been present on ancient Mars, they too might have reduced sulphate minerals to form sulphides in such a lake at Jezero Crater,\u201d Bishop and Parente wrote in an accompanying editorial.<\/p>\n

\"This<\/p>\n

This image provided by NASA shows NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover taking a selfie, made up of 62 individual images on July 23, 2024. (Source: Associated Press)<\/p>\n

There’s no evidence of present-day life on Mars, but NASA over the decades has sent spacecraft to Mars in search of past watery environments that might have supported life way back when.<\/p>\n

When Perseverance launched in 2020, NASA expected the samples back on Earth by the early 2030s. But that date slipped into the 2040s as costs swelled to US$11 billion (NZ$18.5 billion), stalling the retrieval effort.<\/p>\n

Until the samples are transported off of Mars by robotic spacecraft or astronauts, scientists will have to rely on Earthly stand-ins and lab experiments to evaluate the feasibility of ancient Martian life, according to Hurowitz.<\/p>\n

NASA’s acting Administrator Sean Duffy said budgets and timing will dictate how best to proceed, and even raised the possibility of sending sophisticated equipment to Mars to analyze the samples on the red planet. “All options are on the table,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Ten of the titanium sample tubes gathered by Perseverance were placed on the Martian surface a few years ago as a backup to the rest aboard the rover, all part of NASA\u2019s still fuzzy return mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance has uncovered rocks in a dry river channel that may hold potential signs of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,64,69,147,392,145],"class_list":["post-14631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-north-america","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}