NASA’s Perseverance rover has achieved a major milestone by taking samples of a Martian rock that may contain fossilized bacteria, a major new step in its mission to search for traces of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.
The spacecraft found an interesting arrowhead-shaped rock that contains chemical signatures and structures that could have been formed by microbial life billions of years ago, when Mars was much wetter than it is today, Space.com, a website that covers space exploration, innovation and astronomy news, reported.
The website indicated that the vehicle discovered organic compounds inside the rock, which scientists called “Chiava Falls”, which are considered an introduction to the chemistry of life.
The length of the rock is interspersed with veins of calcium sulfate, a mineral deposit that indicates that water – also essential for life – once passed through the rock.
The rover also found dozens of millimeter-sized spots, each surrounded by a black ring and resembling the appearance of leopard spots. These rings contain iron and phosphate, which also appear on Earth as a result of chemical reactions led by microbes.
“These sites are a big surprise,” David Flannery, an astrobiologist and Perseverance science team member from Queensland University of Technology in Australia, said in a statement. “On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossil record of microbes living deep underground.”
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