News Mania Desk/ Piyal Chatterjee / 10th September 2024
NASA’s Perseverance rover has discovered the first indication of prehistoric Marsans. These were little creatures, if they existed at all. really little. meaning microorganisms.The rover, dubbed Percy, discovered this possible indication of life in the middle of July. At a location called Cheyava Falls, the robot had bored into a reddish rock. (It got its name from a Grand Canyon landmark.) This is the first fragment of Mars that Percy has discovered that had living things on it. Here, molecules with a carbon base are referred to as organic. They are the fundamental components of life on Earth.
At the 10th International Conference on Mars in Pasadena on July 25, project scientist Ken Farley revealed Percy’s discovery. It is the California Institute of Technology where Farley works.
Adding to the new excitement, little white spots with black rims speckle the reddish rock sample that Percy found. “They look like a tricolored leopard spot,” Stack Morgan says.
Percy used tools to determine the chemical composition of the materials to investigate these areas. Iron phosphate was also present on the spot rims. Similar in texture and chemical, Earth’s rings have been connected to prehistoric microbiological life. The chemical processes that result in these rings may provide bacteria with energy.
To exist, those rings “don’t require life,” Stack Morgan says. And that’s an important point. “But based on our experience with similar things on Earth,” she says, “there is a possibility that life could have been involved.” So, Stack Morgan concludes, “these could have a biological origin.”
Bringing the rock home is the only surefire way to learn the answer. Gathering samples from intriguing rocks for a future spaceship to return to Earth is a major component of Percy’s mission. Better tools than what a rover can carry on its back can be used to study them once it gets here. Percy has thrown everything it has at this rock for the time being, according to Stack Morgan.
When might the rocks be transported to our planet? Nobody is aware. Mars Sample Return, or MSR, is a program for which funding is presently suspended.
