Mars 2020 "Perseverance" rover, the technology for detecting life is very good!

[Mobile software: Bo Ke Yuan] Scientists have used the same method that will soon be used to search for evidence of life on Mars to look for evidence of the earliest forms of life on Earth at a site in South Australia. An astrobiologist from the University of New South Wales has tested the technology of NASA's upcoming Mars 2020 Perseverance rover to see how it will perform in detecting signs of life on Mars. Bonnie Tice of the University of New South Wales Sydney said in a paper published in the journal Astrobiology that the technology passed the test.

Teece, along with scientists from Macquarie University and the University of Missouri, replicated the method that the Perseverance rover will use to select Martian rocks for biomarker analysis. Biomarkers are naturally occurring molecules that indicate evidence of microbial life. The team examined samples collected from the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. The Flinders Ranges is a great location to conduct a lot of Mars-related research because it is a dry, dusty, windy area that is very barren and therefore a very good analogy for the search for life on Mars.

The researchers hope to use the same techniques that are on the Perseverance rover to pinpoint the best areas to look for life and show that the techniques work well together. When looking for signs of life on Mars, or in the case of the study, ancient life on Earth, it's very important that scientists use multiple lines of evidence. If there's only one piece of evidence, it might not actually be real (it could also be an artifact of contamination, or it could look like life but not actually be). That's why it's so important that the rover has a wide variety of instruments.

These instruments can study and probe deposits on Mars in different ways to look for the best candidates for life. The Perseverance rover is a semi-autonomous vehicle that will explore the Jezero crater on Mars, equipped with high-tech instruments to help identify rocks on the red planet. It has a camera called Mastcam-Z, equipped with "eagle eyes" to identify rock samples from distant Martian landscapes that may be contenders for the search for signs of ancient life. It is also equipped with PIXL, an instrument that uses X-ray rock chemistry to reveal the elemental composition of samples visible to the naked eye.

SHERLOC complements the analytical tools, whose main goal is to detect organic compounds and biosignatures by scanning the environment using spectroscopy. By mimicking the techniques used by the Perseverance rover, the team was able to pinpoint which samples had undergone the most degradation and which were less likely to still preserve these organics. Using similar tools, the team identified rocks in the Flinders terrain that might be good for analysis and then collected those rocks by hand. Although the conditions in Flinders Crater on Earth and Jezero Crater on Mars are very different.

But the techniques have proven successful, despite unique problems with the hotter conditions on our planet. What's notable is being able to analyze how hot these rocks got over their geological history. When sediments are buried and lithified into rock, they heat up because the Earth's interior is hot. This heat can also destroy organic compounds, so knowing the maximum temperature of the rock is also important when looking for organics. By simply looking at the samples, combined with elemental mapping and some of the organic results, the team was able to create a comprehensive description of the environment the fossils were in.

Signs of life

"Overall, we were able to gather reasonable detail about the samples and were able to effectively determine which rocks were most likely to contain fossilized organic compounds, which shows that using these techniques in combination is effective in finding evidence of organics. The same techniques were used on the Perseverance rover with positive results in the search for ancient microbial life on Earth, which bodes well for Mars missions. Interestingly, the researchers did find signs of ancient microbial life from the Cambrian period, which is when animals first evolved on Earth."

Biomarkers have been found, organic compounds have been found, and physical fossils and minerals related to life on Earth have been found. The key is to use multiple lines of research, and if the physical fossils have been obliterated by some geological process, such as sandblasting (which is a big problem on Mars) then other methods need to be looked for signs of life. This is one of the reasons why researchers are also looking for complementary information, such as the chemical composition of rocks. This means a more complete and powerful understanding of this point in geological time.

This is the information the rover will get on Mars as it uses these different tools. NASA has designated a window to launch the Perseverance rover from July 17 to August 5, 2020.

Boco Garden | Research/From: University of New South Wales

The study was published in the journal Astrobiology

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