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Martian life has never felt closer. Since it landed on the Jezero Crater last February, NASA’s Perseverance Rover has been scouring Mars’ surface for ancient life and sampling rock and soil that it will eventually take back to Earth. Scientists believe the crater was once flooded with water, potentially providing habitable conditions for microscopic life forms—and new research suggests that the early Martian atmosphere might be right, too.
The study, published on Monday in Nature Astronomy, explores the likelihood that hydrogen-eating, methane-pooping organisms lived on and under Mars’ surface in a time known as the Noachian period, which took place from 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago. During this age, the planet was regularly pummeled by asteroids and comets that created craters. These features may have then filled with liquid water as the planet warmed.
In the study, researchers from France modeled how ice covering the surface Mars would have melted to accommodate methane-producing microorganisms, which in turn would have lowered the atmospheric temperature and pushed these microbes underground. But what temperature, hydrogen availability, and ultimately conditions suitable for life depend on, the researchers found, was the freezing point of the surface ice.
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