Impact glass on Mars might hold key to discovering alien life

In the search for past alien life on Mars, the discovery of impact glass on the surface of the planet may be the key to finally solving the mystery.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) detected deposits of glass in impact craters on Mars, deposits that might have been created when an asteroid hit the planet. On Earth, scientist Peter Schultz was able to show that bits of ancient flora were preserved inside impact glass that was formed millions of years ago. If life were present on Mars when an impact occurred, then they may have also been preserved in the glass.

With that in mind, researchers Kevin Cannon and Jack Mustard started looking for Martian impact glass, reporting their findings in the journal Geology.

“The work done by Pete and others showed us that glasses are potentially important for preserving biosignatures,” Cannon said. “Knowing that, we wanted to go look for them on Mars and that’s what we did here. Before this paper, no one had been able to definitively detect them on the surface.”

Cannon and Mustard were able to show that there were large impact glass deposits in several ancient Martian craters. One of the craters is near the Nili Fossae trough, a depression around 650 km long and one of the possible landing sites for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover.

Even before the detection of impact glass in the trough, Nili Fossae was already of interest because its crust is thought to date back to when Mars was much wetter. What seem to be ancient hydrothermal fractures—vents that could have provided energy for life—are also present in the region.

“If you had an impact that dug in and sampled that subsurface environment, it’s possible that some of it might be preserved in a glassy component,” Mustard said. “That makes this a pretty compelling place to go look around, and possibly return a sample.” — Bea Montenegro/BM, GMA News