Recent study warns of the possibility of ancient life on Mars

NASA scientists conducted an extensive analysis to find out more about its past.

Curiosity, the unmanned ground vehicle on Mars, recently collected stone fragments in a crater on the red planet.

After dissecting the carbon isotopes of the tests taken by the vehicle, in about six areas of the crater, the researchers manage three hypotheses : degraded carbon dioxide, biologically produced methane later degraded by ultraviolet radiation or cosmic dust.

Whatever the case, according to NASA scientists, all three hypotheses are extremely rare compared to processes on planet earth.

Curiosity has been on Mars since 2012, scouring craters and taking samples of ancient rocks and sending the results back to Earth for investigation.

Carbon, having two stable isotopes like 12 and 13, estimating the measurements of each of them in a substance, can help decide the cycle and discover details about what it came to be, regardless of whether it happened long ago.

The curiosity, To obtain the samples, he penetrated the ancient stone surface, retrieved samples from covered sedimentary layers, and heated them to separate the chemicals.

The researcher Christopher House, from the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, pointed out that these impoverished samples are similar to the sediments of more than 2,700 million years that were taken in Australia.

In addition, the scientist assures that it cannot be determined exactly if the samples were caused by the biological activity of methane when consumed by ancient microbial mats, since the processes and materials on Mars are different from those on Earth.

Every 200 million years, a cloud of galactic dust passes through our solar system, but according to House, it is not enough dust to generate a layer for Curiosity to take a sample.

The cloud must have greatly lowered the temperature on Mars when it still had water, forming huge glaciers.

The third hypothesis: Old life

The third possibility has a biological premise: on Earth, a carbon13 signature of a paleosurface would show that ancient microorganisms consumed microbially created methane.

Old Mars could have had huge structures of methane, released from the subsurface and, once outside, consumed by surface microorganisms.

However, according to scientists, so far there is no real evidence of surface microorganisms in the past Mars scenario.

House insists that the three hypotheses used converge in an unusual carbon cycle, which bears no resemblance to what is happening on earth today.

In addition, he points out that more data is required to determine which is the correct answer.

In about a month, more samples Curiosity has been collecting and analyzing will arrive. NASA recently published another study indicating that Mars may have had habitable conditions of a cold and wet climate.

Researchers from the Paris-Saclay University carried out this study with simulations, where they suggest that Mars could host a large ocean in the lowlands, in the north.

These lands could have had temperatures within our planet's mean, below freezing.