There may be life on Mars, but we haven’t been able to look for it well.

look for life on mars This is one of the greatest human obsessions today. This, of course, is not about finding little green men. But if somehow microscopic life, present or past, indicating that our planet is not the only one that can support living organisms. It will work on other planets as well, but Mars is one of the best studied, and a large number of robots are still actively sampling and working on its surface. However, no one was able to find anything. And according to a new study, it may not be because there is no life on Mars, but because we don’t have the technology or the right databases to find it.

The authors of the work come from Autonomous University of Chilecame to this conclusion after using the most advanced space technology in Atacama Desert. This, besides the fact that driest non-polar place on earthhas a composition that makes it great martian counterpart. For this reason, some specific points in its geography can be used to fine-tune the instruments that look for life on mars.

With them, they saw that robots could walk through microscopic life that would go unnoticed. The genetic material of these organisms has been dubbed as dark microbiome, by analogy with the famous dark matter of the universe. But is there a solution then? Finding him is not so easy. on the spotso the key will be to send samples for your analysis on earth.

The search for life on Mars in the Atacama Desert

The Atacama Desert in Chile is an ancient delta called Red stone, which contains sand and rock rich in hematite and mudstone. That is, it represents mineralogy is like the red planet.

Therefore, this is a good setting to test tools for searching for life on Mars. Thus, when these scientists used said equipment along with the most advanced technology classification of microorganisms according to their genomeThey saw something interesting. “Almost 9 percent genetic sequences obtained by using next generation sequencing fell into the category Not classifiedwhile the remaining 40% of the sequences cannot be assigned to anything more specific than the highest of the taxa, such as orders or domains.

This shows what they qualify as a high degree phylogenetic uncertainty. That is, some microorganisms are detected using genetic sequencing, but it is not known exactly what they are. The reason may be that in fact they are the remains of microorganisms that inhabited the delta in the past and have no relatives at present that do not appear in the classification databases.

If this is already difficult to analyze on Earth, it is much more difficult. on the spotso the first solution proposed by these scientists, analyze samples on Earth. And this is something that is already being worked on. It is expected that he will be able to return samples to our planet in the near future. 2030s or, at the most, that 2040. The good news is that by then, the genetic techniques needed to search for life on Mars may also be very advanced.

Only in this way will it be possible to unravel this mysterious microbial dark matter that drives scientists crazy.