Scientists have spotted clues that Mars might have been more welcoming to life in its ancient past, with hints of microbial activity tucked away in rocks from the Red Planet. A fresh study, led by NASA and boosted by experts from Imperial College London, reveals minerals and organic compounds in Martian stones that scream “habitable environment” from billions of years ago.
The team zeroed in on a spot called the Bright Angel formation inside Jezero Crater, where they found features linked to organic carbon. These could be strong signs—known as biosignatures—of past life on Mars. But hold on: it’s not a slam-dunk yet.
Professor Sanjeev Gupta, an Earth science expert at Imperial College London, puts it straight: “This is a very exciting discovery of a potential biosignature, but it does not mean we have discovered life on Mars. We now need to analyze this rock sample on Earth to truly confirm if biological processes were involved or not.”
NASA’s Perseverance rover has been roaming the 45-kilometer-wide Jezero Crater since 2021. Mission planners picked this spot because it once cradled a massive lake and a river delta—perfect hunting grounds for traces of ancient Martian life. The rover’s big mission? Snag rock and soil samples to ship back to Earth for a deep dive.
Published in the journal Nature, the study spotlights a pale, light-colored rock patch named Bright Angel, nestled in an old river valley called Neretva Vallis that fed water into Jezero’s ancient lake. As Perseverance rolled through the valley, it hit a thick layer of fine mudstones and muddy conglomerates.
The rover’s high-tech tools—PIXL for X-ray analysis and SHERLOC for scanning organics and chemicals—gave the rocks a thorough once-over. Imperial researchers, including Gupta, research associate Dr. Robert Barnes (both backed by the UK Space Agency), and PhD student Alex Jones, pieced together the story from these scans.
Their work mapped out sedimentary layers and textures that point to calm, low-energy spots like lake edges and lake bottoms. The rocks pack plenty of silica and clays—stuff that settles in still waters, not the rushing currents of a river.
That’s the twist: these lake-like deposits turned up at the base of what was a river valley. Jones, who works closely with the Perseverance team, says: “This is unusual but very intriguing, as we wouldn’t expect to find such deposits in Neretva Vallis. What our sedimentological and stratigraphic work has done is indicate a past, low-energy lake environment—and that is precisely the kind of habitable environment we have been looking for on the mission.”
The discovery hints at a time when floodwaters might have turned the valley into a shallow, life-friendly lake in Jezero Crater. As NASA pushes forward with plans to return these samples, the search for signs of ancient microbial life on Mars heats up.
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