NASA’s Perseverance rover has collected four rock samples from an ancient river delta where organisms might have thrived
Since July, NASA’s Perseverance rover has drilled and collected four slim cores of sedimentary rock, formed in what was once a lake on Mars. They are the first of this type of rock to be gathered on another world—and scientists are excited because at least two of the cores probably contain organic compounds.
Having the cores is “fantastic”, if scientists ever hope to answer that question, says Tanja Bosak, a geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Sedimentary search Perseverance landed in the 45-kilometre-wide Jezero Crater in February 2021. Its main goal is to look for signs of past life, and its prime destination is the 3.5-billion-year-old river delta, where sediments long ago turned into rock.
One pair comes from a rock outcrop known as Skinner Ridge, which is made of fine-grained sandstone similar to a type of rock seen in many places on Earth. Viewed up close in Perseverance’s sampling tubes, the Skinner Ridge cores appear light-coloured and studded with round grains of dark material. These darker grains were probably carried by the ancient river that once flowed into Jezero from regions that lie perhaps hundreds of kilometres away.
It turned out to be richer in organics than any spot studied by Perseverance so far, said Sunanda Sharma, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And the organics seem to be most concentrated in spots that are also rich in sulfate minerals, which can harbour signs of life. This suggests that organics and sulfate minerals were concentrated as the lake that once filled Jezero was evaporating, Sharma said.
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