SPACE/COSMOS
Laser-powered device tested on Earth could help us detect microbial fossils on Mars
Scientists successfully identify microbe fossils in terrestrial rocks like those found on Mars, opening up the possibility of searching for fossils on the Red Planet
Frontiers
The first life on Earth formed four billion years ago, as microbes living in pools and seas: what if the same thing happened on Mars? If it did, how would we prove it? Scientists hoping to identify fossil evidence of ancient Martian microbial life have now found a way to test their hypothesis, proving they can detect the fossils of microbes in gypsum samples that are a close analogy to sulfate rocks on Mars.
“Our findings provide a methodological framework for detecting biosignatures in Martian sulfate minerals, potentially guiding future Mars exploration missions,” said Youcef Sellam, PhD student at the Physics Institute, University of Bern, and first author of the article in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences. “Our laser ablation ionization mass spectrometer, a spaceflight-prototype instrument, can effectively detect biosignatures in sulfate minerals. This technology could be integrated into future Mars rovers or landers for in-situ analysis.”
Water, water everywhere
Billions of years ago, the water on Mars dried up. Gypsum and other sulfates formed when pools evaporated, leaving behind minerals that precipitated out of the water – and potentially fossilizing any organic life left behind. This means that if microbes such as bacteria lived there, traces of their presence could be preserved as fossils.
“Gypsum has been widely detected on the Martian surface and is known for its exceptional fossilization potential,” explained Sellam. “It forms rapidly, trapping microorganisms before decomposition occurs, and preserves biological structures and chemical biosignatures.”
But to identify these microbial fossils we first need to prove we can identify similar fossils in places where we know such microbes existed — such as Mediterranean gypsum formations that developed during the Messinian Salinity Crisis.
“The Messinian Salinity Crisis occurred when the Mediterranean Sea was cut off from the Atlantic Ocean,” said Sellam. “This led to rapid evaporation, causing the sea to become hypersaline and depositing thick layers of evaporites, including gypsum. These deposits provide an excellent terrestrial analog for Martian sulfate deposits.”
The scientists selected an instrument that could be used on a spaceflight: a miniature laser-powered mass spectrometer, which can analyze the chemical composition of a sample in detail as fine as a micrometer. They sampled gypsum from Sidi Boutbal quarry, Algeria, and analyzed it using the mass spectrometer and an optical microscope, guided by criteria which can help distinguish between potential microbial fossils and natural rock formations. These include morphology which is irregular, sinuous, and potentially hollow, as well as the presence of chemical elements necessary for life, carbonaceous material, and minerals like clay or dolomite which can be influenced by the presence of bacteria.
Life on Mars?
The scientists identified long, twisting fossil filaments within the Algerian gypsum, which have previously been interpreted as benthic algae or cyanobacteria, and are now thought to be sulfur-oxidizing bacteria like Beggiatoa. These were embedded in gypsum, and surrounded by dolomite, clay minerals, and pyrite. The presence of these minerals signals the presence of organic life, because prokaryotes — cells without a nucleus — supply elements which clay needs to form. They also facilitate dolomite formation in an acidic environment like Mars by increasing the alkalinity around them and concentrating ions in their cell envelopes. For dolomite to form within gypsum without the presence of organic life, high temperatures and pressures would be needed that would have dehydrated the gypsum, and which aren’t consistent with our knowledge of the Martian environment.
If mass spectrometers identify the presence of clay and dolomite in Martian gypsum in addition to other biosignatures, this could be a key signal of fossilized life, which could be reinforced by analyzing other chemical minerals present and by looking for similar organically formed filaments.
“While our findings strongly support the biogenicity of the fossil filament in gypsum, distinguishing true biosignatures from abiotic mineral formations remains a challenge,” cautioned Sellam. “An additional independent detection method would improve the confidence in life detection. Additionally, Mars has unique environmental conditions, which could affect biosignature preservation over geological periods. Further studies are needed.”
“This research is the first astrobiology study to involve Algeria and the first to use an Algerian terrestrial analog for Mars,” said Sellam. “As an Algerian researcher, I am incredibly proud to have introduced my country to the field of planetary science.
“This work is also dedicated to the memory of my father, who was a great source of strength and encouragement. Losing him during this research was one of the most difficult moments of my life. I hope that he is proud of what I have achieved.”
Journal
Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences
Method of Research
Observational study
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
The search for ancient life on Mars using morphological and mass spectrometric analysis: an analog study in detecting microfossils in Messinian gypsum
Article Publication Date
25-Feb-2025
Gulf of Mars: Rover finds evidence of ‘vacation-style’ beaches on Mars
Penn State
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Mars may have once been home to sun-soaked, sandy beaches with gentle, lapping waves according to a new study published today (Feb. 24) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
An international team of scientists, including Penn State researchers, used data from the Zhurong Mars rover to identify hidden layers of rock under the planet’s surface that strongly suggest the presence of an ancient northern ocean. The new research offers the clearest evidence yet that the planet once contained a significant body of water and a more habitable environment for life, according to Benjamin Cardenas, assistant professor of geology at Penn State and co-author on the study.
“We’re finding places on Mars that used to look like ancient beaches and ancient river deltas,” Cardenas said. “We found evidence for wind, waves, no shortage of sand — a proper, vacation-style beach.”
The Zhurong rover landed on Mars in 2021 in an area known as Utopia Planitia and sent back data on the geology of its surroundings in search of signs of ancient water or ice. Unlike other rovers, it came equipped with rover-penetrating radar, which allowed it to explore the planet’s subsurface, using both low and high-frequency radar to penetrate the Martian soil and identify buried rock formations.
By studying the underground sedimentary deposits, scientists are able to piece together a more complete picture of the red planet’s history, Cardenas explained. When the team reviewed radar data, it revealed a similar layered structure to beaches on Earth: formations called “foreshore deposits” that slope downwards towards oceans and form when sediments are carried by tides and waves into a large body of water.
“This stood out to us immediately because it suggests there were waves, which means there was a dynamic interface of air and water,” Cardenas said. “When we look back at where the earliest life on Earth developed, it was in the interaction between oceans and land, so this is painting a picture of ancient habitable environments, capable of harboring conditions friendly toward microbial life.”
When the team compared the Martian data with radar images of coastal deposits on Earth, they found striking similarities, Cardenas said. The dip angles observed on Mars fell right within the range of those seen in coastal sedimentary deposits on Earth.
The researchers also ruled out other possible origins for the dipping reflectors, such as ancient river flows, wind or ancient volcanic activity. They suggested that the consistent dipping shape of the formations as well as the thickness of the sediments point to a coastal origin.
“We’re seeing that the shoreline of this body of water evolved over time,” Cardenas said. “We tend to think about Mars as just a static snapshot of a planet, but it was evolving. Rivers were flowing, sediment was moving, and land was being built and eroded. This type of sedimentary geology can tell us what the landscape looked like, how they evolved, and, importantly, help us identify where we would want to look for past life.”
The discovery indicates that Mars was once a much wetter place than it is today, further supporting the hypothesis of a past ocean that covered a large portion of the northern pole of the planet, Cardenas explained. The study also provided new information on the evolution of the Martian environment, suggesting that a life-friendly warm and wet period spanned potentially tens of millions of years.
“The capabilities of the Zhurong rover have allowed us to understand the geologic history of the planet in an entirely new way,” said Michael Manga, professor of Earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a corresponding author on the paper. “Its ground-penetrating radar gives us a view of the subsurface of the planet, which allows us to do geology that we could have never done before. All these incredible advancements in technology have made it possible to do basic science that is revealing a trove of new information about Mars.”
The other corresponding authors on the paper are Hai Liu of Guangzhou University and Guangyou Fang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The other Penn State co-author is Derek Elsworth, the G. Albert Shoemaker Chair and professor of energy and mineral engineering and geosciences. The other authors are Jianhui Li, Xu Meng, Diwen Duan and Haijing Lu of Guangzhou University; Jinhai Zhang and Bin Zhou of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; and Fengshou Zhang of Tongji University in Shanghai, China.
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Method of Research
Computational simulation/modeling
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Ancient ocean coastal deposits imaged on Mars
Article Publication Date
24-Feb-2025
Ancient beaches testify to long-ago ocean on Mars
Chinese rover finds underground evidence of beach sediments likely deposited 4 billion years ago
University of California - Berkeley
image:
A hypothetical picture of Mars 3.6 billion years ago, when an ocean may have covered nearly half the planet. The blue areas show the depth of the ocean filled to the shoreline level of the ancient, now-gone sea, dubbed Deuteronilus. The orange star represents the landing site of the Chinese rover Zhurong. The yellow star is the site of NASA's Perseverance rover, which landed a few months before Zhurong.
view moreCredit: Robert Citron
A Chinese rover that landed on Mars in 2021 detected evidence of underground beach deposits in an area thought to have once been the site of an ancient sea, providing further evidence that the planet long ago had a large ocean.
The now-inactive rover, called Zhurong, operated for a year, between May 2021 and May 2022. It traveled 1.9 kilometers (1.2 miles) roughly perpendicular to escarpments thought to be an ancient shoreline from a time — 4 billion years ago — when Mars had a thicker atmosphere and a warmer climate. Along its path, the rover used ground penetrating radar (GPR) to probe up to 80 meters (260 feet) beneath the surface. This radar is used to detect underground objects, such as pipes and utilities, but also irregular features, such as boundaries between rock layers or unmarked graves.
The radar images showed thick layers of material along the entire path, all pointing upward toward the putative shoreline at about a 15-degree angle, nearly identical to the angle of beach deposits on Earth. Deposits of this thickness on Earth would have taken millions of years to form, suggesting that Mars had a long-lived body of water with wave action to distribute the sediments along a sloping shoreline.
The radar was also able to determine the size of the particles in these layers, which matched that of sand. Yet, the deposits don't resemble ancient, wind-blown dunes, which are common on Mars.
"The structures don't look like sand dunes. They don't look like an impact crater. They don't look like lava flows. That's when we started thinking about oceans," said Michael Manga, a University of California, Berkeley, professor of earth and planetary science. "The orientation of these features are parallel to what the old shoreline would have been. They have both the right orientation and the right slope to support the idea that there was an ocean for a long period of time to accumulate the sand-like beach."
Manga is the contributing author of a paper about the Zhurong measurements to be published the week of Feb. 24 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
According to the paper's Chinese and American authors, beaches imply a large, ice-free ocean on Mars, even though Mars is too cold today for water to flow as a liquid. They also imply that there were rivers that dumped sediment into the ocean that was distributed by waves along the beaches.
"The presence of these deposits requires that a good swath of the planet, at least, was hydrologically active for a prolonged period in order to provide this growing shoreline with water, sediment and potentially nutrients," said co-author Benjamin Cardenas, an assistant professor of geosciences at The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State). "Shorelines are great locations to look for evidence of past life. It’s thought that the earliest life on Earth began at locations like this, near the interface of air and shallow water."
"This strengthens the case for past habitability in this region on Mars," said Hai Liu, a professor with the School of Civil Engineering and Transportation at Guangzhou University and a core member of the science team for the Tianwen-1 mission, which included China's first Mars rover, Zhurong.
Deuteronilus shoreline
Images taken by the Viking spacecraft in the 1970s first led to speculation that an ocean once existed on Mars, likely during a time when the planet had a denser atmosphere that could retain heat and thus liquid water. The Viking images showed what looked like a shoreline around a large portion of Mars’ northern hemisphere and a depression that could be an ancient seabed.
Yet, the shoreline was so irregular, with ups and downs of up to 10 km, that planetary scientists doubted this scenario. Shorelines, like those on Earth, should be level. Other conundrums, such as what happened to the water, also cast doubt on this theory. The polar ice caps do not contain enough water to fill such an ocean.
Subsequent missions to Mars, however, provided evidence that, while a lot of the planet's water likely escaped to space along with Mars' atmosphere as the planet cooled, much probably also went underground, either as ice or combined with rocks to form new minerals.
In 2007, Manga and his colleagues proposed a theory to explain how today's uneven shoreline could have been created by an ocean. Based on computer modeling, they argued that the planet's huge volcanic region, Tharsis, which contains the solar system's largest volcanoes, altered the planet's rotation after it formed about 3.7 billion years ago, making the level shoreline uneven. He revised that theory in 2017, suggesting that Mars' rotation actually changed while the Tharsis bulge formed, starting about 4 billion years ago.
"Because the spin axis of Mars has changed, the shape of Mars has changed. And so what used to be flat is no longer flat," he said.
With its ground penetrating radar, Zhurong had an opportunity to look for underground evidence of an ancient ocean.
"The southern Utopia Planitia, where Zhurong landed on May 15, 2021, is one of the largest impact basins on Mars and has long been hypothesized to have once contained an ancient ocean," Liu said. "Studying this area provides a unique opportunity to investigate whether large bodies of water ever existed in Mars’ northern lowlands and to understand the planet’s climate history."
Hai and Zhurong scientists reached out to Manga through Cardenas to help interpret the GPR data primarily because of Manga's long interest in Mars' oceans. Manga says that the Rover Penetrating Radar (RoPeR) detected radar reflections about 10 meters below the current surface that are classic indications of sloping, sandy beaches lining an ocean.
"The sand that's on those beaches is coming in from the rivers, and then it's being transported by currents in the ocean and continually being transported up and down the beaches by the waves coming and going up and down the beach," Manga said, noting that Mars has many features that look like ancient rivers. "So there must have been rivers transporting sediment to the ocean, though there's nothing in the immediate vicinity that would have disturbed these beach deposits."
In January 2025, other researchers reported evidence of ripples in sedimentary rocks at the bottom of Gale Crater, the landing site for NASA's Curiosity rover, suggesting the presence of long-gone bodies of liquid water with no ice covering the surface. The Perseverance rover has also found evidence of a river delta in Jezero crater, a mere 2,400 kilometers (1,500 miles) from Zhurong's landing site. But both of these craters are thought to have been lakes, not oceans.
"To make ripples by waves, you need to have an ice-free lake. Now we're saying we have an ice-free ocean. And rather than ripples, we're seeing beaches," Manga said.
The approximately 10 meters (30 feet) of material overlaying the beach deposits were likely deposited by dust storms, material thrown out by asteroid impacts or volcanic eruptions over the billions of years since the ocean disappeared. This turned out to be fortuitous, Cardenas said.
"The shoreline deposits imaged here are pristine, still in the subsurface," he said. "There has been a lot of shoreline work done, but it’s always a challenge to know how the last 3.5 billion years of erosion on Mars might have altered or completely erased evidence of an ocean. But not with these deposits. This is a very unique dataset."
Other co-authors of the paper are Liu's colleagues at Guangzhou University, Jianhui Li, Xu Meng, Diwen Duan and Haijing Lu; Jinhai Zhang, Bin Zhou and Guangyou Fang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing; Fengshou Zhang of Tongji University in Shanghai; and Derek Elsworth of Penn State. Fang, who is with the Aerospace Information Research Institute, developed the Rover Penetrating Radar for Tianwen-1.
The Chinese team was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China and the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation. Manga was supported by the Earth4D program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Schematic showing how a series of beach deposits would have formed at the Zhurong landing site in the distant past on Mars (left) and how long-term physical and chemical weathering on the planet altered the properties of the rocks and minerals and buried the deposits.
On Earth, ocean tides and winds carry sediment toward the shoreline, where the sediment settles out to form a beach deposit with a characteristic dipping angle. New observations indicate that early in its history, Mars also had an open ocean with tides and wind-driven waves that deposited sediment on the beach.
Credit
Hai Liu, Guangzhou Universit
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Article Title
Ancient ocean coastal deposits imaged on Mars
Article Publication Date
24-Feb-2025
Award-winning research may unlock universe’s origins
UTA physicist Ben Jones recognized for pioneering particle physics instrumentation
University of Texas at Arlington
image:
Dr. Ben Jones, an associate professor of physics at UT Arlington, was awarded the 2025 International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) Early Career Researcher Instrumentation Award. Presented by the ICFA Instrumentation Innovation and Development Panel, the award recognizes significant advancements in the innovation and development of new instrumentation for future accelerator experiments.
view moreCredit: UTA
University of Texas at Arlington physicist Ben Jones has received an international honor for his contributions to developing advanced instruments used in particle physics research.
Dr. Jones, an associate professor of physics, was awarded the 2025 International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) Early Career Researcher Instrumentation Award. Presented by the ICFA Instrumentation Innovation and Development Panel, the award recognizes significant advancements in the innovation and development of new instrumentation for future accelerator experiments.
He accepted the award last week at the 2025 Vienna Conference on Instrumentation in Austria. The honor recognizes achievements in instrumentation at an early career stage that lead to impactful advances in particle physics.
Jones serves as associate director of the UTA Center for High Energy and Nuclear Physics and co-director of the UTA Center for Advanced Detector Technology. His research group, Neutrinos and Rare Event Searches, is at the forefront of neutrino physics, leveraging tools from nuclear physics, ionic and atomic beams, super-resolution microscopy, quantum computing, materials science, machine learning and other fields to uncover previously unknown neutrinos.
“Our goal at the Center for Advanced Detector Technologies is to realize transformative new detection methods using techniques from beyond the traditional boundaries of particle and nuclear physics,” Jones said. “I am honored to be recognized by ICFA for leading this research.”
Neutrinos are fundamental particles that are abundant throughout the universe and have almost no mass. They are challenging to study because they interact only vanishingly weakly with ordinary matter—so much so that trillions of them pass harmlessly through the human body and other objects every second. The properties Jones and his team are investigating could shed light on the mechanisms that generated matter in the early universe and provide insights into fundamental physics at extremely small scales.
“I also want to highlight the crucial efforts of talented UTA graduate students and undergraduate researchers, whose commitment to this work has enabled these advances,” Jones said. “I consider this award to be a recognition of the achievements of the whole team.”
Jones’ current research focuses on uncovering the origin of neutrino mass. As part of the NEXT program (Neutrino Experiment with a Xenon TPC), his team applies fluorescence microscopy, a technique they recently published in Nature Communications. He is also involved in the production and optical characterization of cold atomic tritium sources for the Project 8 experiment, which aims to measure the neutrino’s mass. This work was recently published on arXiv. Both projects are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Physics sub-program.
“This is a tremendous and well-deserved honor for Dr. Jones,” said Alex Weiss, professor and chair of the UTA Department of Physics. “He’s doing very important research, assisted by graduate and undergraduate students for whom he serves as an excellent mentor. It’s work that could lead to important discoveries and could enhance our understanding of the origins of the universe.”
