Ancient Life on Mars?
Image courtesy of Pixels.
Ancient Life on Mars?
By Madeleine Gregg
This is an independently submitted op-ed and does not reflect the views of The Tower.
In 2024, NASA’s rover, Perseverance, collected a sample of rock that was formed billions of years ago. They found it on an ancient dry riverbed in the Jezero Crater, which researchers believe is one of the best places on Mars to find evidence that it once held life. The sample, called “Sapphire Canyon,” contains potential biosignatures. A biosignature is material that might have a biological origin but needs further analysis before a conclusion can be reached about whether life is present or not.
On September 10, 2025, NASA announced their findings at a press conference. Even though the presence of ancient life has not been confirmed, scientists took the news as a step towards answering the big question: are we alone in the universe?
The rover found that the sedimentary rock from which the sample was taken, Cheyava Falls, is made of clay and silt. On Earth, these particles are preservers of microbial life. The sample also contains organic carbon, sulfur, rust, and phosphorus.
The rover’s PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) and SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) were the first instruments to collect data. They found what looked like colorful spots, which could have been left behind by microbial life if it had used the rock’s materials as an energy source.
“If there was life on Mars, it would be extremely exciting for science,” NASA senior scientist Lindsay E. Hays wrote. “Not only would it answer one of humanity’s oldest questions about whether we are alone, it could also have implications for how life originates and evolves as well as spreads throughout planetary systems like our solar system.”
Hays adds that other questions could be raised if ancient life were to be discovered on Mars:
“Does life originate at any time and place that conditions are suitable? If life originated either on Mars or Earth, could it have spread to the other planets through normal processes? Is life still present somewhere on Mars today?”
If these samples are confirmed biosignatures, then scientists’ suspicions of Mars once being a habitable, Earth-like planet would be even more likely. Therefore, further research on Mars’s transition into a freezing, uninhabitable, red desert planet would be necessary.
Another consequence of confirmed biosignatures could be that more questions are raised about life’s origins. A microbe called LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) is hypothesized to be the ancestor of all life forms on Earth. If there was or is life on other planets, then is LUCA the source of that life? If so, then how would its descendants have gotten to other planets? Did life originate on Earth or in space?
Regardless of the answers to these questions, exploring the mysteries of the origins of life allows us to reconnect with the wonders of the universe and our existence. It is a reminder that there is still much we have to discover and appreciate.
