For five years, NASA's Mars rover Perseverance has been driving around the red planet with equipment from DTU on board. Using advanced instruments and cameras, it is searching for signs of past life.
And it may already have found them. In an article published in the renowned scientific journal Nature, a team of researchers, including several DTU scientists, shows that Perseverance, using its PIXL instrument, has found chemical compounds that we typically associate with biological life.
This is not definitive proof that there has been life on Mars, says Professor John Leif Jørgensen of DTU Space, who has contributed key technology to PIXL and is co-author of the article. But it is closer than ever before, he believes:
"If the same findings had been made here on Earth, we would unequivocally say that they were traces of very early life billions of years ago. But because it is on Mars, where no life is known to exist today, we cannot say with 100 percent certainty that this is evidence of past life on Mars. However, we can say that we have not been able to find any other explanations for our data than that there has been life on Mars."
The remarkable findings have been reported previously, but have now been analyzed further and published in Nature, which is considered to be one of the most recognized peer-reviewed scientific journals in the world.
And this will spark a major debate in scientific circles, John Leif Jørgensen predicts:
"Discoveries like this can really cause a stir, because if there has been life on Mars, it challenges our entire understanding of the universe. Our results have already been peer-reviewed, but we naturally invite everyone with insight into the field to approach them with an open mind and a critical eye. It is in the nature of science that we question each other's work."
