Organic molecules on Mars.

The Perseverance Rover is currently on its second scientific campaign looking for signs of past life on Mars, its last task was to collect four samples in an ancient River Delta, a river that existed about 3.5 billion years ago and flowed into the lake that covered the jecero crater which is about 45 kilometers in diameter.

It was one of the many lakes that existed in an era in which the red planet was more of a blue planet, at that age at that kinder era on the planet Mars it is called Noeic, which derives from Noah's land, a region of the Martian southern hemisphere named after the biblical character Noah and as you can imagine it was an era where water abounded, forming rivers, lakes, seas and an ocean in the northern hemisphere.

Souce wikimedia.org

It may be that in the images that the Rover sends us we only see rocks and sand dunes, but a geologist sees a region full of valuable information, since you can clearly see on one side the igneous rocks formed by the volcanic eruptions of the past and that cover the crater floor as if it were a Zócalo and on the other hand, the sedimentary rocks are very well shown and differentiated, formed by the transport and accumulation of materials due to the wind to the ice and in the case of the Delta And this is the most interesting rocks created by the materials that the current of the Old River dragged.

Souce wikimedia.org

Life as we know it needs water to prosper and when it dies its remains accumulate in the mud and mud at the bottom of wetlands, the Rover has been exploring this interesting area for a long time, since July 7 it has collected and 12 rock samples of interest to scientists and the last thing he did was analyze The Rock that they have called WillCat Rights, approximately one meter wide and formed when mud and fine sand settled at the bottom of a lake in salt water, a lake that ended up evaporating.

Source from NASA Archives Royalty Free

On July 20, the Rover scraped part of the surface of that rock so that Sherloc could analyze it, an acronym for scanning habitable environments with Raman and luminescence for organic and chemical products, simply put, a device that analyzes the chemical elements of the rocks and Sherlock's analysis He indicated that the samples present a variety of organic molecules that are spatially correlated with the sulfate minerals and the sulfate minerals that are found in layers of sedimentary rocks can give a lot of information about the environments with water in which they occur. they formed.

But in the end the finding of organic molecules does not mean the existence of present or past life on Mars, organic molecules are not life, nor does it necessarily indicate that it comes from life, there are many non-organic natural processes that produce organic molecules, but this gives scientists the clue of where to look for it.

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