Future Mars explorers may mistake objects created by chemical processes for traces of ancient life, according to the reports. The study said the rocks on Mars may contain a variety of non-living deposits that are likely to resemble fossils from the remains of life if life ever existed on Mars.
Distinguishing these “fake fossils” from real evidence that ancient life may exist on the Martian surface is key to the success of current and future missions, the researchers said.
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About 4 billion years ago, the surface of Mars was briefly habitable for life. Astrobiologists analyzed all of the processes known to have possibly produced life-like deposits in Martian rock formations.
Among the dozens of chemical deposition processes the researchers identified (and possibly many more), sediment structures resembling simple microscopic life forms can be found. Some sediments look like bacterial cells and carbon-based molecules, very similar to the basic structure of all known life.
Because structures formed by non-living processes are so similar to traces of life, the origin of any fossil-like samples found on Mars is likely to be very obscure, the team said. They call for more interdisciplinary research to further elucidate how life-like deposits on Mars formed, helping the search for evidence of ancient life on Mars and elsewhere in the solar system. The research was published recently in the Journal of the Geological Society.
At some point in the future, Mars rovers will almost certainly find something that looks a lot like fossils, so it will be crucial if we can confidently distinguish them from structures and materials formed by chemical reactions significance.
For every type of fossil, there is at least one abiotic process that produces very similar products, so there is a great need to improve our understanding of how they are formed.
Researchers have been fooled by life-like chemical processes in the past. There have been many descriptions of structures in Earth’s ancient rocks that look a lot like microbial fossils, and even similar descriptions in Martian meteorites, but upon closer inspection, they have all been shown to be of abiotic origin.
This paper gives us a warning to further study life-like processes in the Martian environment to avoid falling into the same traps again and again.
