NASA robot searches for traces of past life on Mars

The Perseverance robot rover, which landed on Mars in February, has revealed its first scientific results, sparking scientists’ interest in looking for traces of past life at its landing site, a crater that housed a lake ago. three billion years.
The Franco-American “SuperCam” camera installed on the mast of the robot of the American space agency “NASA” was able to monitor the environment of the Jezero crater, a location chosen on the basis of satellite data.
According to the “French” agency, the first images taken by the camera in high resolution confirmed the indications given by the satellite data. The crater, which stretches 35 kilometers in diameter, already contained a closed lake that was previously fed by a river through the delta between 3 and 3.6 billion years ago.
The study, published in the journal “Science”, the first since the landing of “Perseverance”, gives a series of new details about this site, which included a lake the size of Lake Geneva in Geneva, Switzerland.
“Supercam”, a very advanced camera installed in France, has made it possible to monitor sedimentary layers which are fertile ground for “finding traces of previous life”, according to what the National Institute for Scientific Research explained during a press conference, during which he presented the results of this study, which was supervised by one of the researchers, the researchers in it Nicola Mangold.
These layers, which form a plateau about 40 meters high, called Kodiak, are a metaphor for “fine deposits of clay or sand in which organic matter is easy to keep”, according to what this geologist explained. planetary at the Laboratory of Planetary Sciences and Geodynamics.
However, care must be taken in approaching the results, as this organic matter can also come from “hard carbonaceous materials” such as comet sediments.
The organic matter of living organisms is made up of a mixture of molecules of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and, to a lesser extent, oxygen, explains Sylvester Morris of the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetary Sciences of Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse.