There is no other explanation. NASA scientists find possible evidence of past life on Mars.

 

NASA 

There is no other explanation. NASA scientists find possible evidence of past life on Mars.

NASA scientists have discovered a number of red rocks formed billions of years ago from sediments at the bottom of a lake, which could be a potential sign of ancient life on Mars

 Perseverance rover in Jezero Crater, represents some of the best evidence yet that Earth's neighbor, the Red Planet (Mars), may have once harbored life, according to Reuters.

NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy said at a press conference that NASA scientists examined the data for a year and concluded, "We can't find any other explanation, so this may be the clearest evidence of life on Mars—which is very exciting."

NASA released an image of the rock—a very fine-grained, rusty-red claystone—that bears ring-shaped features resembling leopard spots and dark markings resembling poppy seeds. According to the researchers, these features may have resulted from chemical reactions involving microbes during the rock's formation.

“It’s not life itself,” explained Nikki Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “We can’t claim this is anything more than a possible biological signature,” said Joel Horowitz, Perseverance program scientist at Stony Brook University in New York, and lead author of the study. “The reason is that chemical processes can cause similar reactions in the absence of biology, and we can’t completely rule these out based on the rover data alone.”

Horowitz added that the sample collected and analyzed by Perseverance provides a new example of a type of potential biosignature that the research community can explore to try to understand whether these features were formed by life or whether nature conspired to provide features that mimic life activity.

Since 2021, the spacecraft has been exploring Jezero Crater, a region in the planet's northern hemisphere that was once submerged and home to an ancient lake basin. Scientists believe that river channels flowed over the crater wall and formed a lake.