A rock full of veins catches the attention of the scientific team of NASA’s Perseverance rover. Dubbed “Cheyava Falls” by the team, the arrowhead-shaped rock has desirable characteristics that could influence whether Mars hosted microscopic life in the distant past.
Analysis using tools aboard the rover indicates that the rock has qualities that meet the definition of a conceivable indicator of ancient life. The rock shows chemical signatures and structures that may have been formed by life billions of years ago, when the domain explored by the rover contained running water. The scientific team is considering other explanations for the observed characteristics, and long-term studies will be necessary to determine if ancient life is a valid explanation.
The rock, the rover’s 22nd sample, was collected on July 21, as the rover explored the northern edge of the Neretva Vallis, a 400-metre-wide ancient river valley that cut through water rushing into the crater. Jezero a long time ago.
“We designed Perseverance’s direction to make sure it heads toward spaces with attractive clinical sample prospects,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This adventure through the Neretva Vallis riverbed was worth it because we discovered something we had never noticed before and that will give our scientists a lot to study. “
Several analyzes of the Cheyava Falls through the rover’s SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) tool imply that they involve biological compounds. Although such carbon-based molecules are the building blocks of life, they can also take shape through non-biological processes.
“Cheyava Falls is the most confusing, complex, and potentially vital rock ever studied through Perseverance,” said Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist at Caltech in Pasadena. “On the one hand, we have our first convincing detection of biological matter, unique colored blobs that indicate chemical reactions that microbial life can use as an energy source, and clear evidence that water, necessary for life, once passed through rock. On the other hand, we may not know exactly how the rock formed and how many nearby rocks were able to heat the Cheyava Falls and contribute to those characteristics. “
Other main points on the rock, which measures 3. 2 to 2 feet (1 to 0. 6 meters) and is named after a waterfall in the Grand Canyon, also intrigued the team.
In its search for symptoms of ancient microbial life, the Perseverance project focused on rocks that could have been created or modified long ago due to the presence of water. That’s why the team focused on Cheyava Falls.
“This is the kind of key that SHERLOC was designed for: the search for biological matter because it is an essential component in the search for afterlife,” said Kevin Hand, principal investigator for SHERLOC at the US Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA in the South. California, which manages the study mission.
Along the entire length of the rock are gigantic white veins of calcium sulfate. Among these veins are bands whose reddish color suggests the presence of hematite, one of the minerals that gives Mars its unique rusty hue.
When Perseverance took a closer look at those red regions, it discovered dozens of millimeter-sized, irregularly shaped whitish spots, each surrounded by black material, similar to leopard spots. Perseverance’s PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) tool decided that those black halos involve iron and phosphate.
“These points are a big surprise,” said David Flannery, an astrobiologist and member of the Perseverance science team at Queensland University of Technology in Australia. “On Earth, those kinds of features in rocks are related to the fossilized record of microbes living underground. “
Spots like this in sedimentary terrestrial rocks can occur when chemical reactions involving hematite cause the rock to change from red to white. These reactions can also release iron and phosphate, causing the formation of black halos. Reactions of this type would possibly provide a source of energy for microbes, which would explain the arrangement between those characteristics and microbes in terrestrial environments.
In a situation imagined by the Perseverance science team, the Cheyava Falls were first deposited as dust combined with biological compounds that were eventually cemented into rock. Subsequently, a second episode of fluid penetrated the cracks in the rock, allowing the formation of mineral deposits that created the gigantic veins of white calcium sulfate that are observed today and that gave rise to the projects.
Although the biological matter and leopard spots are of great interest, they are not the only facets of the Cheyava Falls rock that confuse the clinical team. They were surprised to discover that these veins are filled with millimeter-sized crystals of olivine, a mineral formed from magma. The olivine would probably be similar to rocks that formed higher up the edge of the river valley and could have formed through the crystallization of magma.
If so, the team has a question to answer: Could olivine and sulfate have been introduced into the rock at uninhabitable temperatures, creating an abiotic chemical reaction that led to the appearance of the leopard spots?
“We destroyed this rock with lasers and X-rays and photographed it literally day and night from almost every angle imaginable,” Farley said. “Scientifically, Perseverance has nothing left to contribute. To fully perceive what happened in this Martian river valley in Jezero Crater billions of years ago, we’d like to bring the Cheyava Falls pattern back to EarthArray so that it can be studied with the hard tools available in laboratories.
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