The discovery is a boost to the rover's mission: finding signs of ancient life on Mars.
“Our results support observations by previous robotic missions to Mars that the Red Planet was once rich in organic material, compounds made primarily of carbon and hydrogen, and that some of that organic material can still be detected billions of years later,” said study co-author Joseph Razzell Hollis, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Natural History Museum in London, in an email to Gizmodo.
In addition to providing scientific data, these analyses do not damage the rock during the scanning process. That’s particularly useful for a rover that is trying to ship its rock samples to Earth in the next decade. If life did exist in Jezero Crater, scientists think there’s a good chance it populated a river delta on the crater’s western rim. That’s because the oldest signs of life on Earth, 3.5-billion-year-old fossilized microbial mats called stromatolites, appear in similar shallows. With water flowing into Jezero for
and organic molecules sitting on the crater’s subaquatic floor, there was a pretty suitable environment for life as we know it.
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