NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has now collected two rock samples, with signs that they were in contact with water for a long period of time, which increased the case of ancient life on the red planet.
“Our first rocks appear to reveal a potentially habitable sustainable environment,” Ken Farley, project scientist for the mission, said in a statement Friday. “It’s a great thing that the water has been there for a long time.”
The six-wheeled robot picked up its first sample, christened “Montdenier” on Sept. 6, and the second, “Montagnac,” from the same rock on Sept. 8.
Both samples, slightly wider than a pencil in diameter and about six inches long, are now stored in closed tubes inside the rover.
An initial attempt to collect a sample in early August failed after the rock proved too fragile to withstand the Perseverance drill.
The rover has been operating in a region known as Jezero Crater, just north of the equator and home to a lake 3.5 billion years ago, when conditions on Mars were much warmer and wetter than they are today.
It was found that the rock that provided the first samples had a basaltic composition and was probably the product of lava flows.
Volcanic rocks contain crystalline minerals that are useful in radiometric dating.
In turn, this could help scientists build an image of the geological history of the area, such as when the crater formed, when the lake appeared and disappeared, and how the climate changed over time.
“An interesting thing about these rocks is also that they show signs of sustained interaction with groundwater,” NASA geologist Katie Stack Morgan told a news conference.
Scientists already knew the crater was home to a lake, but they could not rule out the possibility that it would have been a “flash in the pan” with water flooding the crater for just 50 years.
They are now safer that groundwater was present for much longer.
“If these rocks experienced water for long periods of time, there may be habitable niches within these rocks that could have supported ancient microbial life,” Stack Morgan added.
The salt minerals in the rock cores may have trapped small bubbles of ancient Martian water.
“Salts are excellent minerals for preserving the signs of ancient life here on Earth, and we hope the same can happen to the rocks of Mars,” Stack Morgan added.
NASA hopes to return the samples to Earth for in-depth laboratory analysis on a joint mission with the European Space Agency sometime in the 2030s.
© France-Presse Agency