NASA may have found life on Mars

The Future. NASA’s Perseverance rover has discovered that life found a way to exist on Mars, despite harsh conditions. The rover found several molecules that could be considered the building blocks of life. If the samples are well-preserved and make it back to Earth on a subsequent mission, we could one day see with our very eyes fossils from the Red Planet.

Is there anybody out there?
Per Vice, the answer may be yes.

• NASA’s Perseverance rover found “an abundance of organic molecules” in Mars’ Jezero Crater — where water used to exist some 3 billion years ago.
• Those organic molecules are left behind by past “living things” or by “abiotic chemical processes.”
• There are so many of these molecules that every “target” the rover has scanned contains them.
• The molecule detection is made possible by a new tool that was equipped with the Perseverance — the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC — a terrific acronym).

While the rover hasn’t been able to tell if there are currently any “biosignatures” on Mars, the plan is for the samples to get picked up by a future mission and then brought back to Earth for analysis — hopefully revealing fossilized microbes.