Old Dominion University faculty member Nora Noffke has made a name for herself as a geobiologist during the past decade by producing sedimentary evidence that prokaryote biofilms existed on Earth billions of years ago.
Now she is focusing efforts on showing that similar colonies of bacterial life may have existed on Mars at about the same time.
In an article published online this week by the journal Astrobiology - the article will appear later in the print publication - Noffke reports possible evidence of ancient microbial life in photos taken on the Red Planet by the NASA rover Curiosity.
The article, "Ancient Sedimentary Structures in the <3.7 Ga Gillespie Lake Member, Mars, that Compare in Macroscopic Morphology, Spatial Associations, and Temporal Succession with Terrestrial Microbialities," can be seen at http://online.liebertpub.com/toc/ast/0/0.
To read more, click here.