NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has revealed the “clearest sign” of life on Mars to date.
According to CNN, NASA last week announced that its Perseverance rover last year found intriguing leopard-spot patterns on a rock sample that scientists believe could serve as evidence of ancient life beyond earth.
The Perseverance Rover found special marks on rocks in an old riverbed on the Red Planet that have leopard spots and poppy seed-like markings on them. After analysing, scientists suggested that these marks might have been made by tiny living things that might have existed on Mars in ancient times and called them important enough to look further.
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said, “After a year of review, they have come back, and they said, ‘Listen, we can’t find another explanation. So, this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting.”
The Perseverance rover collected a rock sample called Sapphire Canyon from an old river area on Mars that flowed there over 3 billion years ago. The rover landed in this area to explore and find rocks that were made or changed by water.
After the discovery of the rock, the Perseverance team were thrilled and said that it was exactly what they were looking for.
Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance project scientist at JPL, during a news conference on Wednesday, September 10, explained, “The discovery of a potential biosignature, or a feature or signature that could be consistent with biological processes but that requires further work and study to confirm a biological origin, is something that we’re sharing with you all today.”
“That grows from years of hard work, dedication and collaboration between over 1,000 scientists and engineers here at the (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory and our partner institutions around the country and internationally,” she continued.
The peer-reviewed paper on the landmark discovery has been published in the journal Nature.