Not everything this week is brought to you courtesy of radio telescopes. Space science can involve fieldwork, too.

High in the Atacama Desert in Chile, scientists continue to study the extremely arid region as an analog of Mars. And last week, researchers at Cornell and Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología published a paper in Nature Scientific Reports where they have given us a potential primer in how to look for microbial markers in the soil of Mars.

The soils in the Atacama are clay-rich, and at shallow depths, they contain a diverse population of microbes. It involves a layer of wet clay about a foot down from the surface. As corresponding author Alberto G. Fairén explains: The clays are inhabited by microorganisms. Our discovery suggests that something similar may have occurred billions of years ago – or it still may be occurring – on Mars.

If there were microbes on Mars in the past, there should still be evidence, or markers, of those microbes in the soil. Several rover missions are scheduled to land in the coming years, including NASA’s Perseverance, which is specifically designed to look for those markers. This research gives those rover teams a guide for where to search and what to look for in the Martian clays.

Per the press release: The researchers’ Atacama discovery reinforces the notion that early Mars may have had a similar subsurface with protected habitable niches, particularly during the first billion years of its history.

Life really does find a way, y’all. Here’s hoping we find evidence of it on the red planet.

More Information

Cornell University press release 

“Inhabited Subsurface Wet Smectites in the Hyperarid Core of the Atacama Desert as an Analog for the Search for Life on Mars,” Armando Azua-Bustos, 2020 Nov. 5, Nature Scientific Reports