Was there life on Mars? Perseverance scrapes up promising samples
NASA says its Perseverance rover has pulled up some exciting samples"deposited under conditions where life could potentially have thrived" after trundling around an ancient area of wetland that formed when a Martian river emptied water and sediment into a lake., said its second science campaign is moving along swiftly: Perseverance has scooped up four samples already from the river delta in the Jezero Crater since July 7.
Astrobiologists at the Jet Propulsion Lab team, which looks after the rover and its operation, say this brings the total count of"scientifically compelling" rock samples to 12, but seem particularly interested in a rock the team has dubbed"Wildcat Ridge," where an intriguing sample was collected on July 20.
The agency revealed the rover abraded"some of the surface of Wildcat Ridge" to analyze it with its SHERLOC instrument. The initial analysis, they said, shows the scrapings include"a class of organic molecules that are spatially correlated with those of sulfate minerals."have been found on Mars, but the team noted that when they are found"in layers of sedimentary rock [they] can yield significant information about the aqueous environments in which they formed.
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