In an announcement released by NASA on Mar. 12, the findings from a dry lake bed on Mars, as determined by the $2.5 billion Mars rover mission, results in a conclusion that there may have been primitive life on Mars.
A Martian crater rock has revealed chemistry that could have once supported living things according to NASA news release reported in USA Today.
The rover's analysis of powder drilled from the bedrock on Mars shows consistencies supporting life forms and hits the mark for the mission's goal to find evidence of past, habitable conditions on Mars.
"The key thing here is an environment that a microbe could have lived in, maybe even prospered," said mission chief scientist John Grotzinger of Caltech.
The lake bed where the drilling expedition took place is reported to be over 3 billion years old. "According to the report, the rover probe returned a sample of clay formed in freshwater and laced with sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon, all vital to the biochemistry of life."
"We found a habitable environment that's largely benign. You could have drank the water that flowed," Grotzinger says.
University of California, Berkeley, biochemist Richard Mathies further discussed the miraculous findings, "this is a strong argument for NASA to push for flying higher capability instruments that actually do have the capability and sensitivity needed to search for the presence of life on Mars."
The rover will continue its search in hopes of revealing additional evidence of "even more complex chemicals that may hint at ancient biochemistry."
The Mars rover merely collects samples, the machine can't detect life forms according to scientist Paul Mahaffy of NASA's Goddard Space flight Center.
"We now have food to imagine a very different Mars than the one we see today," says former astronaut John Grunsfeld, NASA's deputy administrator, regaling the possibilities of Mars once being a planet thriving with life VS the now-desert planet.
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