“We have the strongest evidence yet that life once existed on Mars. NASA’s Perseverance Rover drilled into Mars’s Jezero crater and pulled up a piece of mudstone covered in markings that resemble those left behind by metabolizing microbes on Earth,” says historian Ada Palmer.
Time Magazine says a recent discovery by NASA is the “closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars”:
When the Perseverance rover landed in Mars’s Jezero crater—a formation that long ago was Jezero lake—in February, 2021 it turned west. West is where the riverbeds, the deltas, the sites of ancient gushing water once were. In July, 2024, after covering 18 miles in nearly three and a half years, it arrived at a quarter-mile-wide river valley that is home to a 3.2-ft.-long rock NASA scientists have dubbed Cheyava Falls—and there it hit paydirt. As a new paper in Nature reports, a sample Perseverance drilled from the rock may contain potential biosignatures of long ago microbial life.
“This finding by Perseverance…is the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars,” said acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy in a statement. “The identification of a potential biosignature on the Red Planet is a groundbreaking discovery, and one that will advance our understanding of Mars.”
What it found was a rock streaked in a range of colors—red, green, purple, and blue—flecked with poppy-seed-like dots and decorated with what the Perseverance scientists compared to dull yellow leopard spots…The poppy seeds and leopard spots…resemble markings left behind by metabolizing microbes on Earth. When the rover trained its instruments on those features they detected two iron-rich minerals—vivianite and greigite. On Earth, vivianite is frequently found in peat bogs and around decaying organic matter—another item on the microbes’ menu. And both minerals can be produced by microbial life.
An ocean’s worth of water likely lies beneath the surface of Mars.
Mars has a solid core, contrary to what many astronomers previously believed.
Last year, scientists discovered that the Moon likely has hundreds of caves, making lunar colonies conceivable. The moon has pits and caves where temperatures stay at roughly 63 degrees Fahrenheit, making human habitation a possibility, according to research by scientists at UCLA. “Although much of the moon’s surface fluctuates from temperatures as high as 260 degrees during the day to as low as 280 degrees below zero at night, researchers say these stable spots could transform the future of lunar exploration and long-term habitation,” reports NPR.
