Bloomberg – The explorer vehicle Perseverance NASA on Mars He tripped last year with rocks that, according to scientists, could show indications that Mars housed microbial life in the past.
In a new article published in Nature, The researchers offer explanations about a group of Martian rocks that Perseverance discovered and sampled in July 2024. Located in an old river valley called Neretva Vallis, The rocks are muddles with unique and textured spots that NASA described as “intriguing” and that “poppy seeds” or “leopard spots” have been nicknamed.
After reviewing images and data, scientists believe that stains could be microbes by -products. Potentially, The ancient microbes could have been living in the sediment a long time ago, chewing organic materials. This process turned organic matter into these mottled minerals that the vehicle found.
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“This could be very well The clearest life sign that we have ever found on Mars, What is incredibly exciting, ”said Sean Duffy, NASA’s Functioning Administrator, at a press conference this Wednesday.
However, the microbial option is just a possible explanation. The researchers claim that they cannot rule out the possibility that the spots were created by other processes that would not imply biological life, which makes it important to study a sample of material in this area in a laboratory of the Earth.
“The sample that we collected, I think, has all the necessary ingredients to address the question of whether life was or not responsible for the formation of the features we see in those rocks,” Joel Hurowitz, a planetary scientist at Stony Brook University and lead author of the work, told Bloomberg.
Investigations in Mars are in danger
These rocks initially captured the attention of scientists last year, when the Perseverance He found them, and quickly began to speculate with the possibility that they would have been caused by ancient life. But now, NASA faces an uncertain future in regard to its Mars exploration programs. The Trump administration has proposed to cancel an ambitious NASA program to transport marian soil samples to the Earth – a project known as Mars Sample Return – qualifying it as “insequible”.
The rover Perseverance It was designed to be the first phase of the Mars Sample Return initiative. The robot, the size of a car, has been drilling the ground in several places of the Martian surface, collecting samples of land and rocks in containers that are left on the ground. The objective is that, over time, a set of robots is sent to Mars to collect the samples and transport them back to earth.
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But the future of that return is now questioned with The recent attempt to cancel the program. Before the inauguration of Donald Trump, NASA revealed that the budget for the return of samples to Mars had grown until reaching US $ 11,000 million and had requested ideas to the commercial space industry on ways of bringing back the samples in a more economical way. However, NASA did not finally decided a new way to follow before the Trump administration proposed its cancellation.
“We believe there is a better way to do it, a faster way to bring these samples back,” Duffy said in the press conference, adding that He has been asked to spend less money on the agency.
“But I have told the NASA team that if we do not have the resources for the right missions or the right people, I will go to the president, I will go to Congress, I will ask for more money ”, added.
Senator Ted Cruz tried to save the return of samples to Mars with the recent One Big Beautiful Bill. As president of the Senate Committee of Commerce, it included in the bill money so that NASA would develop a new telecommunications spacecraft for Mars that could be used for the Mars sampling return program. However, the program remains in unstable terrain.
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Nicky Fox, NASA’s associated administrator for the Directorate of Scientific Missions, suggested that the future missions of the Agency Artemis program, whose objective is to send human beings to the Moon and eventually to Mars, could recover samples from the rover Perseverance in the future.
“We plan to send more missions to Mars in support of the Artemis program, of which we are really proud, and that the door will open for humans to study and understand the red planet better, “Fox said.” And perhaps even one day we bring back home to the Martian samples so that we can study them here on earth. “
Ultimately, Hurowitz hopes that The scientific community continues to analyze the information collected by Perseverance, But he states that rover is not able to determine if life really formed these rock formations. Ideally, Perseverance sent the exhibition to a land laboratory where it could be studied in more detail, he said.
“If we are not able to recover the samples, then we will be around this question,” Hurowitz said. “Is the answer to that question in a tube somewhere in Mars that we have not yet recovered?”
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