In what is perhaps the biggest scientific discovery in the history of space exploration, NASA confirmed on Friday that bacterial life has been discovered on Mars.
On Monday, NASA scientists were sorting through data sent back from the Mars Rover Curiosity, that had been analyzing the composition of the soil on the Red Planet. It was in this data that Timothy Roderick made the fascinating discovery. “Honestly, we weren’t really expecting to find anything of interest in this data. This was a clump of data that was sent back to us in February, we were just cateloging it for our database. I saw what resembled a bacteria in one of the images, but as I am no bacteriologist, I couldn’t make the confirmation. That call was made by Robert Salazar, a bacteriologist, and an expert in the field of psychrophiles.
Psychrophiles are organisms known to inhabit areas of extreme cold. Salazar confirms that this bacteria isn’t of known Earth origins. He and a team of his colleagues are triple checking to ensure that this bacteria isn’t just contamination from Earth, but at this point that still doesn’t seem to be the case. “I’ve looked at every known bacteria on Earth. If this did come from here, it’s mutated in the Martian environment”, Salazar stated. He adds, ” I just turned 60 last week, and I never thought I’d live to see a discovery like this”.
A press conference to report the findings and display the photograph of the bacteria is expected to be announced early this week. While we are still waiting for final confirmation that this is indeed a bacteria native to Mars, this discovery will likely have a lasting impact in our approach to space science and astrobiology.