The most enthralling rock yet found on Mars—a speckled hunk of mudstone that just may contain evidence of ancient alien life—is still worth getting excited about.
Teased last year in a preliminary announcement from NASA, that’s the official conclusion of a peer-reviewed paper, published today in Nature, that reports a deeper analysis of the curious outcrop. Were it found on Earth instead of Mars, the rock’s speckles would likely be interpreted as evidence for a microbial feeding frenzy that occurred long ago. But getting certainty about what this rock truly contains likely requires hauling it off the Red Planet and delivering it back to Earth—an ambitious multiphase mission that NASA calls Mars Sample Return.
“This result gives us reason to consider the possibility that Mars was host to microbial life,” says the new study’s co-author Joel Hurowitz, a geoscientist at Stony Brook University. Although this is nowhere close to direct, clinching evidence of Martian life, Hurowitz and his team hope that the findings help scientists “make progress in our quest to understand whether there’s life on other planets in the solar system and beyond.”
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