NASA's Perseverance mission on Mars has performed several world firsts, including the first controlled flight on another planet and the first extraction of oxygen from the Martian atmosphere.
The mission also confirmed once and for all last year that the Jezero Crater on Mars was once a massive lake. Now, a new study shows that organic molecules featured abundantly in these waters. The findings provide compelling evidence that life may have once existed on the red planet, as per a report by IFLScience.
NASA's Perseverance rover landed on Mars in February 2021. Having spent its first 208 Martian days investigating the planet, the rover has now provided compelling new evidence that organic molecules were once abundant in the lake on the rover's landing site, the Jezero Crater.
In an interview with IFLScience, Dr. Joseph Razzell Hollis, from the Natural History Museum in London, co-lead author on a new study presenting the findings, said, "It looks like Jezero Crater is indeed what we suspected based on orbital imaging. It used to be a lake about three/three and a half billion years ago. And that's really exciting for us, obviously, because liquid water on Mars 3 billion years ago was around the same time that life evolved on Earth. So it raises a question, did that water on Mars also contain the building blocks for life?"
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