Life on Mars?

The issue of life on Mars has been discussed for several years, but it has only been recently that the facts have become so strong that they can hardly be ignored. NASA's Perseverance rover extracted a sample from a mudstone named "Sapphire Canyon" in Jezero Crater, an ancient lake bed, and detected a mixture of minerals, organic carbon, and microscopic textures that on Earth are almost exclusively linked to microbial activity. Scientists discovered pairs of iron-phosphate and iron-sulfide minerals together with organic compounds in patterns which biology normally produces, and after a year of thorough peer review and publication in Nature, the findings continued to hold up. Of course, no one is saying "we found life," however, NASA has called it the closest we have come so far, and they do not say that lightly.

In the meantime, Curiosity also discovered long-chain organic molecules in an old lake bed in Gale Crater, molecules chemically similar to the fatty acids in cell membranes on Earth. Every non-biological explanation was tested and fell short. The evidence against life on Mars is becoming increasingly scarce, and getting those rock samples back to Earth may be the turning point.

(Image Credit: NASA)