Probing the Red Planet: Finding past life at Jezero Crater

Perseverance Mars rover is gathering up samples of Martian rock and soil that could help tease out an answer concerning past life on Mars....
Space
2022-08-10T16:24:38Z
Since its wheels-down landing in February of last year, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has been busily at work, on the prowl steering itself across the Jezero Crater landscape.
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Above all, just how hard might it be to have a consensus among scientists that, yes, signs of life, be it past or present has been observed by the rover? What's a slam dunk finding look like?
"Perseverance, and any rover for that matter, would be unable to provide definitive data pertinent to evidence of past life on the Red Planet," said John Mustard, professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
For Mustard, don't anticipate slam-dunk revelations anytime soon.
"Beyond detection of complex life forms in a fossil, there is no evidence that the rover could collect," Mustard said. "Geologic morphology and chemistry too often create shapes and chemical signals that have been mistaken for past life on Earth…let alone Mars!"
Similar in view is Steve Ruff, a planetary geologist with a focus on the mineralogy of Mars at Arizona State University in Tempe.
Ruff is also "Mars Guy," producing the hit video series that is following the exploration of Jezero Crater by the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter, serving up science, engineering, and search for life on Mars observations using a novel in-person experience.
"We need samples back to find signs of life because the life we can reasonably expect to find will be microscopic single-celled organisms that lived billions of years ago," Ruff said. "Their traces, whether organic or textural, will be hard to discern with the available instruments and capabilities of Perseverance."
Ruff says that the sample preparation and analytical techniques needed to prove life was present at the rover's roaming site are only available on Earth.
There's no expectation that the surface samples that Perseverance can acquire, even down to the several centimeters it can drill, Ruff advised, "will have living or recently dead microbes given the totally inhospitable conditions, starting with the complete lack of bio-available moisture."
Ruff added, however, that Perseverance has two instruments that can detect and identify organic molecules. "So conceivably it could identify present life, but its presence is exceedingly unlikely," he said.
As for any consensus among scientists that signs of past or present life have been seen by Perseverance, once again, don't wait for a slam dunk observation.
"The experience with the Mars meteorite ALH84001 demonstrated how hard it's going to be to prove there was life on Mars," Ruff said. "I think it will require the combination of organic molecules in structures that likely were formed or influenced by microbes, like stromatolites, to convince scientists, including me, that Martian life was present."
In late July, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) restructured the multi-faceted Mars Sample Return effort, a move touted as reducing the complexity of that mission while increasing the chance for success.
Part of that shift in gears was ditching an ESA-provided Sample Fetch Rover or its associated second lander. In its place, the project now embr