NASA's Perseverance Mars rover finds possible signs of ancient Red Planet life

[Admin]

NASA's Perseverance rover stumbled upon a Mars rock. It seems to suggest evidence of ancient life on the Red Planet.

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover finds possible signs of ancient Red Planet life : Read more

 

[Catastrophe]

I am a little surprised that this got buried. It does contain suitable caveats.

The rover also found dozens of millimeter-sized splotches, each surrounded by a black ring and mimicking the appearance of leopard spots. These rings contain iron and phosphate, which are also seen on Earth as a result of microbe-led chemical reactions.

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover finds possible signs of ancient Red Planet life | Space

Cat

 

[snowyphile]

An egg McMuffin would be convincing.

 

[Catastrophe]

NASA just scored a badly needed win: The best potential evidence of alien life yet

The Perseverance rover found potential evidence of life on Mars. Three features make the rock promising, but NASA must bring it to Earth to study it.

uk.news.yahoo.com

To be clear, NASA is not declaring that it's discovered Martian life. Rather, its Perseverance rover has drilled a sample from a rock with attributes that could have come from ancient microbial activity, the agency announced Thursday.

Cat

 

[Torbjorn Larsson]

Organics have been seen before, albeit not by Perseverance and at that locality.

But for all of this the rule is that if there are abiotic confounds it is the null hypothesis. Besides that it hints of thermal and redox processes that would support the abiotic origin:

The rock has other confusing features that muddy the picture of how it formed, Stack Morgan says. It is shot through with white veins of calcium sulfate. These veins are filled with millimeter-sized crystals of olivine, a mineral that forms from magma. The inclusion of both the spots and these volcanic features in the same rock is “a little bit mysterious,” Stack Morgan says, as they point to different origins.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/nasa-perseverance-rover-hint-life-mars

What it does give us right here and now is a more heterogeneous environment with more possibilities for life.