Drawing Ever Closer, To A Definitive Finding Of Biosignatures, On Mars...

Yesterday's JPL / NASA press conference indicates there is abundant evidence at a rock outcropping called Wildcat, on Barsoom -- that strongly suggests (but does not yet PROVE) that there was once some form of microbial life, on the red planet.

Here is the latest (along with an archive picture of the last time the core driller was jammed with rocky regolith, at right):

. . .One delta feature that Perseverance recently sampled and studied, a 3-foot-wide (0.9 meters) rock the team calls Wildcat Ridge, is particularly intriguing. Wildcat is a fine-grained mudstone that likely formed at the bottom of Jezero's ancient lake, team members said. Perseverance's SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument found that the rock is packed with organics, which are spatially associated with sulfur-containing minerals called sulfates.

"This correlation suggests that, when the lake was evaporating, both sulfates and organics were deposited, preserved and concentrated in this area," SHERLOC scientist Sunanda Sharma, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said during Thursday's press conference. . . .

"On Earth, sulfate deposits are known to conserve organics and can harbor signs of life, which are called biosignatures," Sharma added. "This makes these samples and this set of observations some of the most intriguing that we've done so far in the mission and fulfills some of the excitement that the team had when we were approaching the delta front. . . ."

Now you know. . . but we will likely have to wait for the 2030 or so sample return mission on Mars, to definitively nail down that these are in fact biosignatures.

Onward, into a wonderful weekend of soft sunshine -- and falling leaves. Grin. . . .

नमस्ते