Just Published In Nature... We Have New Evidence That Around 3 Billion Years Ago, There Could Well Have Been Life In Rivers On Mars...

The Perseverance rover at Jezeero Crater -- in what is almost certainly an ancient and now long dessicated river bed. . . has used an instrument called SHERLOC to establish that at least a few of the rocks there contain mineral trace signatures, signatures that would be the fingerprint of. . . organic biological processes -- life. That's exciting, but not definitive.

Here's the latest, from NASA:

. . .The new Nature paper looks at 10 rock targets SHERLOC studied, including one nicknamed “Quartier.”

“We see a set of signals that are consistent with organics in the data from Quartier,” Sharma said. “That grabbed everyone’s attention.”

SHERLOC’s capabilities center on a technique that looks at the chemical makeup of rocks by analyzing how they scatter light. The instrument directs an ultraviolet laser at its target. How that light is absorbed and then emitted – a phenomenon called the Raman effect – provides a distinctive spectral “fingerprint” of different molecules. This enables scientists to classify organics and minerals present in a rock and understand the environment in which the rock formed. Salty water, for example, can result in the formation of different minerals than fresh water.

After SHERLOC captures a rock’s textures with its WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera, it adds data to those images to create spatial maps of chemicals on the rock’s surface. The results, detailed in a recent paper in Nature, have been as promising as the instrument’s science team had hoped. . . .

Onward, to a sunny, mountain bike riding weekend, now -- by my own ancient, vast fresh water body. . . the fifth largest on the planet. Smile.

नमस्ते