Perseverance discovers rich organic material on Mars

Image courtesy of NASA

 NASA's Perseverance rover has taken samples containing trace amounts of organic molecules, possibly remnants of ancient life on Mars.

The samples were retrieved during the rover's second scientific venture in the Jezero Crater, an area theorized to have once been the site of a convergence between a martian lake and river.

“We picked the Jezero Crater for Perseverance to explore because we thought it had the best chance of providing scientifically excellent samples – and now we know we sent the rover to the right location,” said NASA's Associate Science Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen.

In the previous scientific venture, Perseverance obtained samples from around the crater's surface. The rover found the area to be covered in igneous rocks formed by subterranean magma that gave scientists clues as to when the river formed due to their age.

For the second venture, Perseverance retrieved samples from the river's delta in, among other places, an area known as "Wildcat Ridge", a three feet wide rock structure believed to have been formed as mud and fine sands settled from an evaporating lake. These samples were analyzed by Perseverance's Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument.

Within these samples, SHERLOC found a sizable quantity of organic materials, the largest on the mission to date. While organic materials have been discovered on Mars before, the large amount discovered in "Wildcat Ridge" in proximity to an area where life could have potentially thrived as well as the presence of sulfate, a mineral known for its preservation of fossils on Earth, has scientists eager to transport the samples back to Earth for further analysis.