A few billion years ago, Mars was significantly more volcanically active than now. Scientists are scrutinizing the ash left from those times, as it may contain traces of life that existed on the red planet back then.
Volcanic ash on Mars
Debris from ancient volcanic eruptions on Mars may provide new clues in the search for alien life, a new study suggests.
The newly discovered rock type was found at the landing site of a future Mars rover, expected to be launched in 2028.
In a study published last month in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, researchers studied the rocks using data from orbiting satellites and concluded that they were probably brought in from the air, possibly in the form of volcanic ash, billions of years ago. However, no volcanoes have been found at the site to date.
Mystery of dark rocks
Scientists believe that the dark rocks may have protected the mineral-rich rocks beneath them, and these rocks may retain signs of life. However, researchers say little is known about how the surface rocks actually formed.
To learn more about these rocks, the study authors mapped a 19,300 square mile (50,000 square kilometers) region using data from the context camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a NASA satellite that has been searching for evidence of ancient water on Mars since 2006.
It is theorized that dark rocks once covered the entire site, but now they are only found in small areas. Researchers speculate that this was because the ash was preserved at lower elevations inside impact craters, where it mixed with groundwater.
The team hopes to learn much more about the place known as Oxia Planum when the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover arrives on Mars in 2028. The rover can’t drive on the dark rocks because they are too rough, but the findings suggest it can access mineral-rich rocks at the edges of the deposits.
Future missions to the Red Planet
The Rosalind Franklin Mars rover mission has been heavily delayed, in part because of the war in Ukraine. The European Space Agency (ESA) has broken ties with former partner Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. This gap resulted in the mission not launching in 2023.
In May 2024, NASA joined forces with ESA to complete the mission. NASA was an original partner in the mission when the Mars rover project began more than 20 years ago, but left it due to budget problems.
The rover will be able to drill the surface of Mars and collect rocks at a depth of 6.6 feet (2 meters), which it will then analyze in an onboard laboratory, ESA said.
Searching for signs of life in ancient rocks
Researchers choose ancient rocks to analyze because they believe they are the ones that give us the most hope of finding signs of life. The authors of the new study suggest that the dark rocks examined there were formed around the middle Noachian and early Hesperian periods (4 to 3.7 billion years ago).
“These rocks are extremely old, but this is the time in Mars’ history we want to be looking at,” the scientists note. “If life ever existed on Mars, it would have been a very long time ago because the planet has been arid and fairly inactive for the past three billion years. So we want to look at rocks before this period to see if there are traces of water or microbial life.”
According to www.space.com
