As Phoenix settles down to begin its search for organic compounds on Mars, a new study indicates that the oceans that once covered Mars were far too briny to support life as we know it.
“Our sense has been that while Mars is a lousy environment for supporting life today, long ago it might have more closely resembled Earth,” Andrew Knoll, Fisher Professor of Natural Sciences and professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard, said in a press release.
“But this result suggests quite strongly that even as long as four billion years ago, the surface of Mars would have been challenging for life. No matter how far back we peer into Mars’ history, we may never see a point at which the planet really looked like Earth,” he added.
“This doesn’t rule out life forms of a type we’ve never encountered,” Knoll says, “but life that could originate and persist in such a salty setting would require biochemistry distinct from any known among even the most robust halophiles on Earth.”
The study, done in collaboration with scientists at Stony Brook University, was published in the journal Science (subscription required). Harvard University has a summary of the study here, as does Sky & Telescope.
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