NASA’s Mars mission discovers amazing signs of life on Red Planet

NASA has released some of its results about its discoveries on Mars and has come up with amazing new discoveries about finding possibilities of life on the Red Planet.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has been roaming on Mars’ surface since 2012 and has given two major findings it discovered with the help of the collected data. Firstly, it was discovered why Mars has seasonal variations of methane gas and secondly, they figured out that Martian rocks contain organic molecules that point towards ancient life.

“The chances of being able to find signs of ancient life with future missions, if life ever was present, just went up,” said Curiosity’s project scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

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The Curiosity rover verified that Mars contained methane gas, a suspect for containing life, but didn’t know where it came from, since this gas is produced from biological sources. After analyzing the data, researchers determined that methane was likely coming from frozen ice pocket, methane clathrates. There is chance that the gas frozen in ice was first made by life, but there are also other ways methane can be produced, thus it’s not definite indication for life on Mars, reported Futurism.

“These clathrates lock the methane inside a water-ice crystal structure and are incredibly stable for millions of years until environmental conditions change and suddenly they can release that gas,” astrophysicist Alan Duffy told Science Alert.

Secondly, publishing their study in the journal Science, Curiosity collected soil samples from two spots in Gale carter that are approximated to be some three billion years old. When heated, the researchers identified numerous organic molecules generally found in Earth’s organic-rich sedimentary rock. This is a promising discovery towards signs of ancient life.

Associate administrator at NASA, Thomas Zurbuchen exclaimed, “With these new findings, Mars is telling us to stay the course and keep searching for evidence of life. I’m confident that our ongoing and planned missions will unlock even more breathtaking discoveries on the Red Planet.”

Lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, Michael Meyer said, “Are there signs of life on Mars? We don’t know, but these results tell us we are on the right track.”