A study has revealed what the chances are of finding life on Mars

The research work carried out by the experts of the Center for Astrobiology on an ancient river bed in the Atacama desert (Chile) suggests that finding traces of life on Mars will be more difficult than expected.

And it is that current instruments to detect life on Mars, and others that will soon be sent, could do it not be sensitive enough to find life on the red planet, as verified by researchers from the Center for Astrobiology (CAB), the Superior Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA).

In the study, the conclusions of which were published in the journal Nature Communications, the researcher Armando Azua-Bustos, CSIC researcher at the Department of Planetology and Habitability of the CAB, together with an international group of researchers, suggests that, depending on the type, the potential evidence of life on Mars could be difficult, if not impossible, to detect with the current generation of instruments.

The researchers described a new analogue of Mars in the Atacama Desert, called “Red Rock”located in northern Chile, and all data indicate that it is the remnant of an ancient river delta formed under arid conditions in the Jurassic, more than 100 million years ago.

In addition to noting that “Piedra Roja” consists of a variety of interbedded sandstone and clay sediments typical of a river bed, the researchers determined the abundant presence of hematite, an iron oxide which is what gives Mars its characteristic Red.

There they found a place geologically very similar to those explored by NASA’s Perseverance robot, and they also discovered that in “Piedra Roja” there is a variety of microorganisms that are very difficult to classify, and they proposed the term “Dark Microbiome”, by analogy with the “dark matter” in the Universe.

Several “biosignatures” (substances that can indicate the presence of life in a place) have also been found in the “Piedra Roja”, to the detection limit of the instruments which can be found in a research lab.

“The remarkable thing was that using a variety of instruments that are on or soon to be on Mars,” Azua-Bustos indicated, “and depending on the biosignature sought, many of these instruments could hardly detect them, or simply were not able to detect them. to do it”.

These results, as noted by the CAB, are revealing the importance of bring samples from Mars to Earth, in order to use the most powerful detection techniques available in laboratories.

Indeed, NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and other institutions are already working to bring samples from Mars to Earth.

“Is very important have models of the Earth as similar to Mars as possible to understand how the different biological signatures have been preserved and to fine-tune the procedures and technology to find them”, underlined researcher Víctor Parro, co-author of the work.