Mars may be covered in dozens of different nonbiological "false fossils," which could interfere with the search for life on the Red Planet, two researchers say.
NASA's Perseverance rover touched down on Mars in February, and the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch the Rosalind Franklin rover in 2022. Both will scour the Martian surface for biosignatures — traces of past life — left behind from around 4 billion years ago, when the planet may have been habitable.
However, a new paper suggests a possible complication in that search.
"There is a real chance that one day, we will observe something on Mars that looks really biological, only to realize several years later, after further research, that this thing was actually formed by nonbiological processes," co-author Julie Cosmidis, a geobiologist at the University of Oxford in England, told Live Science.
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