Page 142 - Çevre Şehir İklim İngilizce - Sayı 3

Traces Of Possible Ancient Life From Mars To Earth: An Assessment Of The
Microbial Ecology Of Salda Lake And Its Protection
Introduction

It has always been a common dream of many nations to find the traces of
life on extraterrestrial planets from past to the present. Over the past century,
various space organizations from all over the world have designed spacecraft
to fly into the space to solve this mystery. Space rovers have been sent since
1960 to determine the physical and chemical compositions of these planets
orbiting the Solar system (NASA, 1970). American National Aeronautics and
Space Administration's (NASA) journey to Mars mission is the latest one of
these missions realised with Perseverance Rover on 30 July 2020 (NASA,
2020). After 480 million kilometer journey lasting 7 months, the Perseverance
Rover landed on Mars at Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021 (Rodriguez, 2021)
and was assigned the task of searching for traces of past life estimated to
have existed 3.5 billion years ago in the 45 km diameter Jezero Crater shown
in Figure 1 (NASA, 2020). In this context, the Perseverance exploration vehicle
is programmed to collect rock samples to investigate the traces of ancient life
on Mars (Rodriguez, 2021).

a) b)

Landing

Figure 1. (a, b) A view of the Perseverance Rover's landing site on Jezero Crater from
different angles. (NASA, 2020)
In the light of the information received from the spacecraft, the question
of how to detect the potential traces of life in Mars' has been strived to be
clarified. The formations of magnesium carbonate, which are found in high
amounts on the surface of Mars, have been studied to find the answer to this
question. Magnesium carbonate mineral gives clues about life due to the fact
that this mineral is involved in the protection of microorganisms ( Horgan et
al., 2020; Scheller et al., 2021). Exploration of aquatic environments on the
surface of Mars and the presence of high amounts of magnesium carbonate
minerals suggest the potential of finding biological traces on Mars' (Russell
vd., 1999; Horgan vd., 2020).

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