Cape Canaveral, FLA. (AP) – NASA's Mars Rover Perseverance has discovered rocks in a dry river canal that can have potential signs of old microscopic life, scientists reported on Wednesday.
They emphasized that in-depth analysis is needed from the sample that is collected there by perseverance idealiter in laboratories on Earth-Voordat comes the conclusions.
Roaming Mars Since 2021, the Rover cannot immediately detect life. Instead, it carries an exercise to penetrate rocks and tubes to keep the samples that are collected from places that are considered most suitable for hosting life billions of years ago. The samples are waiting for picking up the earth – an ambitious plan that is on hold when NASA is looking for cheaper, faster options.
Calling an “exciting discovery”, a few scientists who were not involved in the research-Janice Bishop of Seti Institute and the Mario Parente of the University of Massachusetts Amherst-Bellen quickly that non-biological processes could be responsible.
“That is part of the reason why we can't go that far to say:” A-ha, this is the proof of life positive “,” lead researcher Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University told The Associated Press told. ” The only thing we can say is one of the possible explanations is a microbial life, but there may be other ways to make this set we see. “
Anyway, Hurowitz said it is the best, most compelling candidate who is still in the search of the Rover for possible signs of long -ago life. It was collected the 25th monster; The count is now a maximum of 30, with six to go.
“It would be great to be able to show convincingly that these functions were formed by something that lived on another planet billions of years ago, right?” Said Hurowitz. But even if that is not the case, it is “a valuable lesson in all the ways in which nature can work together to fool us.”
Last summer collected, the monster came from reddish, clay-rich mud stones in Neretva Vallis, a river canal that once wore water in Jezero Crater. This access to sedimentary rock, known as the fierce Angel formation, was examined by the science instruments of the perseverance before the exercise came out.
Together with organic carbon, a building block of life, Hurowitz and his team found miniscule spots, called Poppy seeds and leopard spots, which were enriched with iron phosphate and iron sulfide. On earth, these chemical compounds are the by -products when microorganisms on organic matter derive on organic substances.
The findings appeared in the Nature magazine.
Ten of the titanium monster tubes were placed on the Mars surface a few years ago as a backup of the rest on board the Rover, the most important goal in the still Fuzzy return mission of NASA.
When perseverance was launched in 2020, NASA expected the monsters back on earth in the early 2030s. But that date slid in the 2040s when the costs stored to $ 11 billion, so that the collecting effort was retained.
Until the monsters of Mars are transported by robot-like spacecraft or astronauts, scientists will have to rely on earthly stand-ins and laboratory experiments to evaluate the feasibility of old Martian life, according to Hurowitz.
On earth, micro -organisms often interact with minerals in antarctic lakes.
“There are no indications for microbes on Mars today, but if there had been an old mars, they too can have reduced sulfate minerals to form sulfides in such a more Jezero Crater,” wrote Bishop and Parente in an accompanying editorial.
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