NASA finds clearest sign yet of life on Mars as huge discovery made on planet

NASA has announced it has found the clearest sign of life on Mars.

Dean Duffy, the new NASA administrator, said a sample collected by the Perseverance rover was the "clearest sign of life" on Mars. The sample, called "Sapphire Canyon," was collected back in July last year at a site of rocky outcrops on the edges of Neretva Vallis, a river valley carved by water rushing into Jezero Crater long ago.

NASA officials shared details about the discovery on Wednesday and is the best evidence so far that Mars once harboured life. Since the rover landed on the Red Planet in 2021, it has explored the Jezero Crater, in Mars' northern hemisphere that was once home to an ancient lake.

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The "precious" samples were extracted from what was once a river delta. of the 43 tubes that were taken to Mars, 38 were for collecting samples with another five being "witness tubes" that are designed to document the cleanliness of its sampling system throughout the mission.

"The Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover searches for signs of ancient microbial life, to advance NASA's quest to explore the past habitability of Mars," NASA said of the rover's mission. "The rover is collecting core samples of Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and soil), for potential pickup by a future mission that would bring them to Earth for detailed study."

The rover has sent images of Mars back to Earth since it landed on the Red Planet. It showed crystalline solids left over from the water that once flowed over the planet's surface.

The discovery of traces of life was the culmination of 30 years of research on the planet, scientists said during a presentation today. He added the findings went through a peer-review process that ended up proving the samples that were likely to have a biological origin.

Scientist Joel Hurowitz revealed small signatures that were found in the crater pointed to the existence of life on Mars. It is believed the life existed on Mars billions of years ago.

Professor Sanjeev Gupta, a planetary scientist from Imperial College London, and one of the authors of a study that was published in the journal Nature, reportedly said, according to the BBC: "We've not had something like this before, so I think that's the big deal.

"We have found features in the rocks that if you saw them on Earth could be explained by biology - by microbial process. So we're not saying that we found life, but we're saying that it really gives us something to chase."