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Features like the leopard spots in the center of this image could be signs of ancient life
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
NASA’s Perseverance rover has found a rock full of what may be signs of ancient life. The rock, nicknamed “Cheyava Falls” after a famous waterfall in Arizona, shows hints that it could have supported living microbes billions of years ago — but for now, there’s no way to be sure if life actually existed.
The rock measures about 1 meter by 0.6 meters and is mostly red, with thin veins of white calcium sulfate that likely form when water flows through fissures in the rock, depositing minerals in the cracks. Water is one of the necessary ingredients for life, but it wasn’t the only one the researchers found while studying Perseverance’s data.
They saw that between the stripes of white, there were strange spots of light color, each a few millimeters wide and ringed with dark material containing iron and phosphate. “These spots are a big surprise,” he said David Flannery at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia in a NASA press release. “On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilized record of microbes living underground. This is because the type of chemical reaction that creates these types of leopard spots on Earth’s rocks it can also provide useful energy for microbes.
In the same area where the rock is located, Perseverance also detected some organic compounds that are often considered the building blocks of life. All this together could be taken as a sign of past Martian microbes, but it is far from a smoking gun. “We have to be cautiously excited, but pragmatically limited,” he says Paul Byrne at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who was not involved with this work. “For now, this is a sign of (probably) wet rocks undergoing chemical alteration.”
After all, there are ways to create all these signatures without involving any living organisms. And there are some signs that the region may have once been flooded with hot magma, which could have prevented any life from surviving at the site.
Unfortunately, it’s unlikely we’ll know for sure if Cheyava Falls has any signs of life anytime soon. “We zapped that rock with lasers and X-rays and literally imaged it day and night from almost every angle imaginable,” he said. Ken Farley at the California Institute of Technology in the press release. “Scientifically, perseverance has nothing more to give.”
The rover has added a sample of Cheyava Falls to its stash, which is expected to be brought back to Earth by a future mission. Once that happens, researchers will be able to use much more advanced tools to study the sample in detail. “There’s really no substitute for doing laboratory analysis on Earth,” says Byrne.
But NASA’s plans to return Perseverance samples from Mars have been hit by a series of setbacks over the past year or so. It is not yet clear when – or if – we will be able to look at this intriguing rock up close.
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