In a dry river valley on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover may at last have found its reason for being: evidence of ancient alien life—and with it, a lifeline for the space agency’s grand but troubled plan to bring Red Planet materials to Earth.
This potentially cosmos-quaking evidence may look like merely a humble rock, but it’s unlike any other seen before on Mars. Dubbed “Cheyava Falls” after a feature in Earth’s own Grand Canyon, the rock appears to be a coffee-table-sized, arrowhead-shaped outcropping of mudstone. But its most notable visual features are its reddish and whitish stripes—the former are speckled with dark-rimmed, light-colored splotches resembling a leopard’s spots. The red color likely comes from the iron mineral hematite, the Perseverance team says. The rover’s studies have revealed the whitish striations to be veins of water-deposited calcium sulfate, and they show that the dark rims of the curious “leopard spots” contain molecules of iron phosphate—a potential food for hungry subsurface microbes.
Perseverance’s instruments also show that the rock contains organic compounds, carbon-based molecules that are building blocks of life as we know it. This is a rare find for the rover, which has been exploring in and around the planet’s Jezero Crater since landing there in February 2021. (Perseverance’s precursor, the Curiosity rover, also found organics during its explorations of another region, Gale Crater.)
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Taken cumulatively, Perseverance’s data show not only that water long ago percolated through Cheyava Falls but also that the mudstone once hosted other conditions that are typically associated with microbial life. In hematite-laced sedimentary…
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