NASA’s Perseverance rover has made a significant discovery on Mars, uncovering rocks in a dry river channel that may hold potential signs of ancient microscopic life.
The rover, which has been exploring the Red Planet since 2021, gathered samples from the Neretva Vallis region, a river channel that once flowed into the Jezero Crater.
While scientists are excited by the find, they emphasize that thorough analysis, particularly in Earth-based laboratories, is needed before any conclusions about ancient life can be drawn.
Katie Stack Morgan, from NASA’s Mars 2020 project, said: “Jezero crater was selected because it is in a location among the most ancient terrains on Mars, exposing some of the oldest rocks anywhere in the solar system.
"And these really ancient rocks provide his a window into a period of time that is not particularly well represented on our own planet, earth, but it is a time when life was emergent on earth and could have been on Mars as well."
She continued: “Jezero is also indisputably the site of an ancient lake which we know because we have two river valleys entering into the crater and a river valley exiting the crater, through which water flowed out of the crater.”
Perseverance’s mission is to search for signs of ancient life, but the rover cannot directly detect life. Instead, it carries a drill to extract samples from rocks and stores them in tubes, waiting to be returned to Earth for further study.
NASA had originally planned to retrieve these samples by the early 2030s, but the timeline has since slipped into the 2040s due to cost increases and the complexity of the mission.
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said: “We are exploring in places where there are rivers and where there were lakes, we think that is where we would find signs of ancient life on Mars.
“A year ago we thought we found what we believed to be signs of microbial life on the Mars surface.
“So we put it out to our scientific friends to pressure test it, to analyse it, to go ‘did we get this right, do we think this is signs of ancient life on Mars?
“After a year of review, they have come back and said ‘listen, we can’t find another explanation’ so this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we have ever found on Mars.”