Scientists on NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover said today that the rover has collected several attractive samples of organic rock from an ancient river delta on the Red Planet.
These samples have now been saved for a planned future mission that hopes to retrieve the specimens and bring them back to Earth for the first sample return from Mars.
“The rocks we’ve been investigating in the delta have the highest concentration of organic matter we’ve yet found on the mission,” Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley said during a press conference on Thursday, September 15.
“And of course organic molecules are the building blocks of life, so this is all very interesting that we have rocks that were deposited in a habitable environment in a lake carrying organic matter.”
With the four samples collected in the delta, which scientists believe is an ancient lake bed, the rover has now collected a total of 12 samples. You can see more details about each sample on this NASA website.
The rover’s landing site, Jezero Crater, is home to this fan-shaped delta that formed about 3.5 billion years ago, in what appears to be the convergence of a Martian river and lake .
Perseverance is currently investigating the delta’s sedimentary rocks, formed when particles of various sizes settled in the once-aqueous environment. During its first scientific campaign, the rover explored the crater floor, finding igneous rock, which forms deep underground from magma or during volcanic activity on the surface.
Now, in its second scientific campaign, the rover studies the delta, where it has found organic materials. Although organics have previously been found on Mars by both Perseverance and Curiosity, this latest detection was made in an area where, in the distant past, sediments and salts were deposited in a lake in conditions where it could have existed life
Farley said, for example, they found a sandstone that carries grains and rock fragments created far from Jezero Crater, and a mudstone that includes intriguing organic compounds.
Wildcat Ridge (bottom left) and Skinner Ridge (top right). (NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS)
“Wildcat Ridge” is the name given to a rock about 3 feet (1 meter) wide that probably formed billions of years ago when mud and fine sand settled in a lake of salt water that evaporated.
On July 20, the rover grazed part of the surface of Wildcat Ridge so it could analyze the area with an instrument called Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals, or SHERLOC.
What the SHERLOC analysis found is that the samples contain a class of organic molecules that correlate with those of sulfate minerals. Sulfate minerals found in sedimentary rock layers can provide significant information about the aqueous environments in which they formed.
“This correlation suggests that as the lake evaporated, both sulfates and organics were deposited, preserved and concentrated in this area,” SHERLOC scientist Sunanda Sharma said during the press conference. “I personally find these results very moving because it seems to me that we are in the right place with the right tools at a very crucial time.”
NASA said organic molecules consist of a wide variety of compounds made primarily of carbon and usually include hydrogen and oxygen atoms. They may also contain other elements, such as nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur.
Although there are chemical processes that produce these molecules that do not require life, some of these compounds are the chemical building blocks of life. The presence of these specific molecules is considered a potential biosignature: a substance or structure that could be evidence of past life, but that may have also occurred without the presence of life.
“We chose Jezero Crater for Perseverance to explore because we thought it had the best chance of providing scientifically excellent samples, and now we know we’ve sent the rover to the right location,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA in Washington. in a press release.
“These first two science campaigns have yielded an incredible diversity of samples to bring back to Earth through the Mars Sample Return campaign.”
NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are cooperating to plan ways to bring the first samples of material from Mars back to Earth for detailed study. As of now, the plan is for a Sample Return Lander to land near or in Jezero Crater, carrying a small rocket onto which the samples collected by Perseverance would be loaded.
Two Ingenuity-like helicopters will provide a secondary capability to retrieve samples on the surface of Mars. Once the sample cache is launched from the Red Planet, another spacecraft would capture it in Mars orbit and then bring it back to Earth, perhaps in the early to mid-2030s.
These first samples collected and returned could answer a key question: Did life ever exist on Mars?
This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.