Since NASA began driving rovers around the surface of Mars people on Earth have been anxious to find signs of life. According to NASA researchers however, the evidence isn’t there yet.
In a recent paper published in the journal Astrobiology Old Dominion University geologist Nora Noffke pointed to signs of possible microbial life. Noffke claimed that sedimentary structures in the sandstone of Gillespe Lake bore a resemblance to the interaction between microbial matts and their environment.
“Though there may not be life on the surface of Mars at the present, this does not exclude the possibility that life may have thrived earlier on the Red Planet,” said Noffke
After two decades of investigating microbial matts Noffke believes that the first step in finding signs of life is to search lake beds and other former aquatic environments for signs of microbial interaction. If the Earth and Mars shared similar environmental histories the microbially induced sedimentary structures (MISS) could bear a resemblance to similar structures on Earth.
However, it is not immediately clear that Mars and Earth have similar environmental histories. Being further from the Sun Maris is a much colder planet than Earth. A November, 2014 article published in Nature Geoscience suggests that Mars may have only had substantial water flow during periods of intense volcanic activity, lasting only tens or hundreds of years at a time.
In the case of the sandstone structures researchers with NASA’s curiosity rover team believe that they can be explained by normal patters of erosion.
To read more, click here.