Speaking of looking for signs of life, a recent image taken by the Hazcam on NASA’s Perseverance rover is intriguing and exciting to planetary scientists and astrobiologists alike. The image shows a region now informally named ‘Enchanted Lake’ and is the first close-up image of the sedimentary layers at the base of the river delta in Jezero Crater. The delta sits where a Martian river flowed into the crater lake billion of years ago, and scientists have wanted to study it since Jezero was announced as the landing site.

When Percy landed in Jezero, an early analysis of the rocks around the landing zone revealed that the crater floor was made of igneous rocks. That’s great for understanding the interior of Mars and the age of geologic features, but rocks that formed under extreme heat aren’t exactly a great place to go hunting for signs of microbial life.

Then again, considering the wild places we keep finding life, we could be wrong about that, too. But I digress.

We’re not expecting to find current life in Jezero crater. We’re looking for fossilized life, and the best place to find fossils is in sedimentary rocks. As mud, silt, and sand is carried down rivers, such as the one that fed this crater lake, it is deposited on top of all that igneous rock. If microbial life existed on Mars, it could have been carried within the river water as well and been preserved within the layers of sediment. That sediment then became compacted and cemented into rock, and those fossilized lifeforms could still be there.

That is a lot of ‘if’ and ‘could’. Honestly, we won’t know until we can bring some sedimentary rock samples back to Earth in the Mars Sample Return campaign, which is planned for sometime in the 2030s. In the meantime, Percy is going to analyze and maybe even sample some sedimentary rocks in an area called ‘Hogwallow Flats’, but the team may have the rover return to ‘Enchanted Lake’ later this year.

More Information

NASA JPL press release