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Was Mars, really, home to microbial life in a distant past? The question which has bothered scientists for quite some while might finally be close to getting some answer. On July 21 NASA’s Perseverance Rover found a vein-filled rock. The rock which they nicknamed “Cheyava Falls”, after a Grand Canyon waterfall’ has shown signs of existence of ancient life on the planet.
The arrow-shaped rock has been found by the rover along the northern edge of Neretva Vallis, an ancient river valley formed by water flowing into Mars’ Jezero crater. The rover’s instrument called SHERLOC(Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) scanned the rock multiple times and the study indicated that it contains many organic compounds, which are considered as the building blocks of life.
Along the length of the rocks, the rover found large white calcium sulfate veins, which enclose within itself bands of mineral called hematite, that gives mars the rusty red color. On inspecting further the rover has picked very small, irregularly shaped off white spots that are ringed with a black material. Perseverance’s PIXL(Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) has detected that these black rings contain both iron and phosphate. These spots occur when hematite undergoes a chemical reaction and turns the rock from red to white. And release iron and phosphate that leave a black imprint behind them. According to David Flannery, an astrobiologist and member of the Perseverance science team, “On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface.”
Ken Farley,Perseverance project scientist of Caltech in Pasadena said, “Cheyava Falls is the most puzzling, complex, and potentially important rock yet investigated by Perseverance.” While this is a compelling discovery indicative of the presence of a source that can provide energy to microbial life, they still haven’t been able to figure out how the rocks were formed.
The rock contains crystals of olivine, a mineral that is formed from magma, this revelation too has confounded the scientists. It could be that these rocks are a result of crystallization of magma. NASA reports that Perseverance has used all its resources to analyze the rock and it can offer no more, for further investigation they want to bring the sample of that rock back to earth. Farley said, “To fully understand what really happened in that Martian river valley at Jezero Crater billions of years ago, we’d want to bring the Cheyava Falls sample back to Earth, so it can be studied with the powerful instruments available in laboratories.”
The arrow-shaped rock has been found by the rover along the northern edge of Neretva Vallis, an ancient river valley formed by water flowing into Mars’ Jezero crater. The rover’s instrument called SHERLOC(Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) scanned the rock multiple times and the study indicated that it contains many organic compounds, which are considered as the building blocks of life.
Along the length of the rocks, the rover found large white calcium sulfate veins, which enclose within itself bands of mineral called hematite, that gives mars the rusty red color. On inspecting further the rover has picked very small, irregularly shaped off white spots that are ringed with a black material. Perseverance’s PIXL(Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) has detected that these black rings contain both iron and phosphate. These spots occur when hematite undergoes a chemical reaction and turns the rock from red to white. And release iron and phosphate that leave a black imprint behind them. According to David Flannery, an astrobiologist and member of the Perseverance science team, “On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface.”
Ken Farley,Perseverance project scientist of Caltech in Pasadena said, “Cheyava Falls is the most puzzling, complex, and potentially important rock yet investigated by Perseverance.” While this is a compelling discovery indicative of the presence of a source that can provide energy to microbial life, they still haven’t been able to figure out how the rocks were formed.
The rock contains crystals of olivine, a mineral that is formed from magma, this revelation too has confounded the scientists. It could be that these rocks are a result of crystallization of magma. NASA reports that Perseverance has used all its resources to analyze the rock and it can offer no more, for further investigation they want to bring the sample of that rock back to earth. Farley said, “To fully understand what really happened in that Martian river valley at Jezero Crater billions of years ago, we’d want to bring the Cheyava Falls sample back to Earth, so it can be studied with the powerful instruments available in laboratories.”
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