NASA says that this Martian rock has potential signs of life. Here is what must happen next

For four years, the perseverance of the NASA rover looked for possible signs of ancient life on the surface of Mars. He found a myriad of interesting features in his travels, including a rock with strange spots, discovered inside the Jezero de Mars crater. Nicknamed “Cheyava Falls”, the discovery of 2024 immediately attracted the attention of scientists to earth, because her spots indicated that she could contain a potential biosignature – a sign of life.

The rover went to work. The bot analyzed the composition of the rock and the surface chemistry, then extracted a nucleus nicknamed “Sapphire Canyon”.

His hard work has apparently borne fruit. NASA scientists abandoned the bomb on Wednesday: Cheyava’s falls could actually be the most clear sign of past life ever found on Mars.

“We had almost left the crater. It was the last set of sedimentary rocks that we were probably going to look in the mission,” a planetary scientist at Stony Brook University told Gizmodo. He is the main author of a new study detailing the results published in Nature.

“It was very surprising that it would have been the place where the potential biosignures jumped from the rock and said:” Hey, look here! “”

Out of the 30 Roche and Régoliths samples, perseverance has collected in the past four years, none shows any more promise as proof of ancient life on Mars than this. But in fact confirm a biosignature depends on the return of this sample to earth. The issue is one of the most sustainable questions in our world: is life on Earth really alone?

“I don’t think we will never take this determination without this sample in our hands,” said Hurowitz.

The case of a potential biosigrance

The surface of the Cheyava falls has tiny black spots that NASA scientists call “poppy seeds”, interspersed among the largest “leopard” stains. These characteristics suggested to Hurowitz and his colleagues that chemical reactions had occurred when these sediments were deposited.

Perseverance analysis revealed that Cheyava falls are rich in organic carbon, sulfur, oxidized iron (rust) and phosphorus. This combination of chemical compounds could have provided a potential source of energy for ancient microbes, but the researchers decided to probe the rock more.

Using the Pixl instrument (planetary instrument for the lithochemistry of the X -ray of persistence to map the rock surface chemistry, they discovered a distinct diagram of minerals arranged in reaction fronts – contact points where chemical and physical reactions occur – which corresponded to the stains of leopard. These spots also wore mineral signatures, Vivianitis and greigitis.

On Earth, these minerals are often by-products of reactions which arise from microbes metabolizing organic matter, according to Hurowitz. Above all, it is also possible that spots on Cheyava falls are formed through another process, most likely by geothermal heating during the early stages of rock formation. “But there is no real and clear evidence that the rocks were heated to a large extent,” said Hurowitz.

The researchers are far from excluding these possible explanations – 140 million kilometers away, in fact, in fact.

“Deciding between the origins for life and the purely chemical origins needs laboratory analyzes of the Sapphire Canyon square sample”, told Gizmodo Mario Parente, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Umass Amherst. Parent was not involved in the study, but co-wrote a corresponding point of view on the results.

Why Sapphire Canyon must return to earth

Laboratory analyzes are “essential” to answer key questions that could confirm whether it is, in fact, a potential biosignature, said Parente. Techniques such as the identification of minerals on a nanometric scale and high resolution chemical cartography of the sample samphir could determine if it really contains vivianitis, graigite and carbon closely intertwined with these minerals, he explained.

In addition, isotopic analysis would be able to discover models called “fractionation” which are revealing signs of microbial activity. “Isotopes are one of the clearest ways to separate the biology from geology,” said Parente. “I think these measures could probably answer the question quite clearly,” concluded Hurowitz.

However, there is a major obstacle in the manner of such a business: in the current state of things, NASA has no solid plan to go on Mars to recover the Canyon Sapphire – or one of the samples of Perseverance elsewhere. The agency worked with the European space agency to develop a campaign to return to Mars samples with several bets to recover the samples, but the climbing of costs and complexity blocked its progress.

The White House budget proposal for the 2026 fiscal year, published in May, threatened to reduce the financing of the effort, but in July, the Chamber’s credit subcommittee has moved to allocate $ 300 million to the program. This bill is still underway and it remains entirely possible that the missions can be canceled.

“I would hate seeing us not going back the samples,” said Hurowitz. After spending more than 20 years working on the missions of March Rover, he presents what is at stake: “It is this incredibly well established exploration program to achieve this objective of trying to understand whether Mars was used or not,” he said.

“With the data we have of rover, we will have this enticing index that says” maybe “, but we cannot answer the question.”