By Mary O’KEEFE

Mars is always surprising scientists and engineers. Recently CVW published an article about the discovery of pure sulfur on the surface of the Red Planet.

“Mars is an obvious target for exploration because it is close by in our solar system, but there are many more reasons to explore the Red Planet. The scientific reasons for going to Mars can be [summarized] by the search for life, understanding the surface and the planet’s evolution, and preparing for future human exploration,” according to the European Space Agency.

Scientists are searching for ancient life on Mars and recently a discovery by NASA Perseverance, which was built by and managed by JPL, brought scientists a little closer to that finding.

Recently a vein-filled rock caught the eye of the JPL/NASA Perseverance science team that found “fascinating traits that may bear on the question of whether Mars was home to microscopic life in the distant past,” according to JPL/NASA.

The discovery made by the rover was in the area scientists have named Cheyava Falls.

“When we think about the search for life beyond Earth, we can think of the three keystones for life as we know it. Life requires liquid water, it requires the elements for building life – carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur and a smattering of roughly 54 elements from the periodic table. And then life needs some form of energy that it can harness from the environment,” said Kevin Hand, JPL principal investigator of the instrument SHERLOC. “Those three elements – the water, elements and energy – are how we frame our search for life beyond Earth.”

SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) is an instrument on the Perseverance rover that is mounted on the rover’s robotic arm and uses cameras, spectrometers and a laser to search for organics and minerals that have been altered by watery environments and may be signs of past microbial life, according to NASA. SHERLOC was one of the instruments that found the area that appears to contain organic compounds.

Like early explorers on Earth, scientists at JPL have named areas on Mars. Here are some of those names in the area of the most recent discovery: the rock where the discovery was made is in the Cheyava Falls area. Apollo Temple is the name of the abrasion that was on the Cheyava rock. Sapphire is the name that was given to the core sample the rover got from the Cheyava rock. The rock was found within the Bright Angel region of Mars’ Jezero Crater.

As Perseverance was rolling towards the rim of Jezero Crater scientists could see a valley that was carved by an ancient river on Mars.

“And that river cut through the Jezero Crater rim and fed into [an] ancient lake that once filled Jezero Crater,” Hand said. “Throughout the mission we’ve been quite excited to see what’s in this dry riverbed, in this ancient riverbed. From afar we could see these light-toned rocks.”

The rover got to go into the valley, checking the first box of elements needed for life – the need for liquid water.

“We know that the environment in which we are investigating – this dry river valley – once had liquid water flowing through it,” Hand said. “These bright deposits that were left behind may well have been fine-grained sedimentary deposits left behind in this ancient river.”

As far as the elements’ portion needed to maintain life, instruments like SHERLOC have been able to investigate the mineralogy chemistry and have determined that the chemistry of the Bright Angel deposit has a lot of the elements needed for life, Hand added.

That checks the second box needed for life. Now what is needed is the third keystone – energy. A clue regarding needed energy may be found in the leopard-type spots on the rock that are being examined.

“On the one hand, we have our first compelling detection of organic material: distinctive colorful spots indicative of chemical reactions that microbial life could use as an energy source, and clear evidence that water – necessary for life – once passed through the rock. On the other hand, we have been unable to determine exactly how the rock formed and to what extent nearby rocks may have heated Cheyava Falls and contributed to these features,” stated Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist of Caltech, in a NASA statement.

“The team still has a lot of work to do to understand how this rock was formed and the history of this rock. Some of that will require getting the sample back to Earth so we can examine the sample in detail. But it may be that this rock in this region represents ancient sediments through which hot fluids from an ancient hot spring once flowed,” said Hand.

That is the theory from which Hand and his science team are presently working.

And that leads to another NASA mission, the Mars Sample Return. That mission has a spacecraft land on the surface of Mars, collect the samples that have been prepared by Perseverance, and bring them back to Earth. This is a joint mission with the European Space Agency.

“One of the oldest, most profound and yet unanswered questions that we have, not just in science but as a civilization, is whether or not we are alone,” Hand said. “[That is why], with each turn of the wheel on Mars, that question motivates our investigation of Jezero Crater and getting these samples back to Earth to see whether or not there are any hints of life in these rocks that come from a past potentially habitable Mars.”