University of Winnipeg geography professor Dr. Ed Cloutis is helping space agencies in Canada and the United States to analyze a Martian rock whose unusual spotted surface could represent the clearest evidence yet of ancient life on Mars.
Dr. Cloutis, who directs UWinnipeg’s Centre for Terrestrial and Planetary Exploration (C-TAPE), is one of three Canadian scientists who contributed to a new paper, published September 10 in Nature, that analyzes a rock sample collected last summer by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover from the edges of a dry river channel.
It’s the clearest sign of potential life that we’ve seen to date, and we’ve been exploring Mars for a while now.
Dr. Ed Cloutis
The paper’s publication was accompanied by announcements by NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, who noted the sample—a core of clay-rich mudstone, no bigger than a pencil stub—contains minerals that can be associated with the presence of microbial life, though alternative non-biological explanations are also possible.
Dr. Cloutis said the rock’s leopard-like spots were found to contain organic molecules composed of carbon and hydrogen.
“Those can be associated with life but they can also be associated with non-life,” he said. “It’s a rather tantalizing discovery. We detected carbon and that got us excited, because we associate carbon with life here on Earth. But to know definitively, we have to bring the sample back to Earth.”
While that isn’t expected to happen until the 2030s or 2040s, the findings are the closest science has come to discovering evidence that there was once life on Mars.
“It’s the clearest sign of potential life that we’ve seen to date, and we’ve been exploring Mars for a while now,” said Dr. Cloutis, who has been involved with four of NASA’s five Martian rover expeditions.
From Mars to Thunder Bay
The sample, dubbed “Sapphire Canyon,” is one of 30 collected by Perseverance, which touched down on Mars in 2021. Its on-board instruments include a drill and titanium tubes for collecting samples.
Dr. Ed Cloutis is one of three Canadian scientists working to analyze the rock sample.
Analyzing a sample that is 225 million kilometres from Earth is no easy task. Dr. Cloutis and his paper co-authors remotely analyzed the sample using readings from Perseverance’s onboard instruments. This research was undertaken with financial support from the Canadian Space Agency.
Perseverance collected the sample while exploring an area of Mars that is about 3.5 billion years old.
“We know that we had primitive life on Earth at that same time, so there’s a parallel there,” Dr. Cloutis said.
He is now turning his attention toward analyzing rocks of a similar age and composition here on Earth. They are found as close by as Thunder Bay, Ont., and as far away as Australia.
“My role in this is to look at rock types here on Earth and see what we can say about how they formed, and see if they’re not produced by biology,” he explained. “There’s a site out near Thunder Bay that’s almost two billion years old, and there are rocks there that look similar to this one we saw on Mars. We’re just starting to analyze those samples in the lab.”
