(ORDO NEWS) — Mars rovers tasked with hunting for traces of biology could navigate through microscopic lifeforms without smelling anything, simply because their instruments are not up to the task.
A new study from Earth‘s oldest desert shows how modern technology can’t always detect signs of life on our planet’s surface. Not to mention Mars.
The researchers argue that without improving our ability to identify long-dead microbial “dark matter”, life on Mars will continue to elude us.
Especially if the life we’re looking for existed billions of years ago, when the planet was warmer and wetter than it is today.
In Chile’s Atacama Desert, there is an ancient delta called the Red Rock, which contains a lot of sand and rocks. in hematite and mudstone.
Geologically, this region is very similar to parts of Mars, which is why astrobiologists often use it as a model for the red planet.
When researchers in Chile tested the mineralogy of the Red Stone with today’s best instruments, they found some puzzling clues.
Nearly 9 percent of the genetic sequences generated by next-generation sequencing fell into the “unclassified” category, while 40 percent of the remaining sequences could not be assigned to anything more specific than the highest taxa, such as orders or domains.
Researchers from the Autonomous University of Chile (Universidad Autónoma de Chile) say their results reveal “an unusually high degree of phylogenetic uncertainty.”
The team came up with a new concept to represent this uncertainty, which they call the “dark microbiome.”
The term basically refers to microorganisms that scientists can detect using genetic sequencing without knowing exactly what they are.
“Thus,” the researchers write, “Redstone’s dark microbiome could be composed of truly new existing species not found anywhere else on Earth, but it could be” that such a dark microbiome is actually a relic community of microbial species that inhabited the Red Stone Delta in the distant past, whose relatives are not in the existing sequence databases.
The redstone samples have also been analyzed with test instruments used on or destined for Mars, showing that microorganism detection is a much more difficult task, with limited or no detection in most cases.
Last year, the Perseverance rover found “clear signs” of organic matter on Mars as it rolled across an ancient river delta.
In the years before, the Curiosity rover found signs of organic molecules in both sand and dried mud.
These are promising discoveries, but organic matter is not a sure sign of life. It is still unclear whether these molecules are actually of biological origin.
“Our analyzes with test instruments that are on Mars or will be sent to Mars show that while the mineralogical composition of Redstone matches that found by ground-based instruments on Mars, the red planet, the same low levels of organics would be difficult.
If at all possible, detectable in Martian rocks depending on the tool and technique used,” the Chilean researchers conclude.
“Our results highlight the importance of returning samples to Earth to finally resolve the question of whether life ever existed on Mars.”
For years, NASA has been planning to bring their samples back from Mars to study them up close. But this is easier said than done. It takes a space mission to travel to and from Mars to get further than ever before.
The date for this historic moment is currently set to some time in the 2030s or 2040s. Hopefully by then our technology will be better equipped to properly examine what we have discovered.
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