The Perseverance rover has made an exciting discovery on Mars, identifying the building blocks of life in a sample from an area of the Jezero delta.
The Perseverance rover has made an exciting discovery on Mars, identifying the building blocks of life in a sample from an area of the Jezero crater where there was once plentiful liquid water. The organic molecules it discovered can be formed in various ways including non-organic processes, so they aren’t proof that life once existed there — but they do show that life could potentially have thrived there millions of years ago.
When the sample from Wildcat was studied using Perseverance’s SHERLOC instrument, researchers discovered that the sample included organic molecules. These building blocks of life have previously been discovered on Mars by the Curiosity rover in the Gale Crater, but in the case of the recent finding, the molecules were found in the sedimentary rock close to sulfate minerals that form in water.
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