Abstract
The discovery of life on other planets and moons in our solar system is one of the most important challenges of this era. The second ExoMars mission will look for traces of extant or extinct life on Mars. The instruments on board the rover will be able to reach samples with eventual biomarkers until 2 m of depth under the planet’s surface. This exploration capacity offers the best chance to detect biomarkers which would be mainly preserved compared to samples on the surface which are directly exposed to harmful environmental conditions. Starting with the studies of the endolithic meristematic black fungus Cryomyces antarcticus, which has proved its high resistance under extreme conditions, we analyzed the stability and the resistance of fungal biomarkers after exposure to simulated space and Mars-like conditions, with Raman and Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry, two of the scientific payload instruments on board the rover.
Highlights
In the few years, in situ space exploration missions will be devoted to the detection of biogenic signatures of extinct or extant life on Mars
The UV-visible absorbance spectrum of the purified pigments showed a strong absorbance in the UV region, and a characteristic absorption peak was observed at 230 nm corresponding to typical melanin UV absorption
The main question is: do potential fungal biomarkers remain unaltered during pyrolysis processes? Our study reports that pyrolysis Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) is able to detect fungal signals, even when the biomarkers are present in low amounts
Summary
In the few years, in situ space exploration missions will be devoted to the detection of biogenic signatures of extinct or extant life on Mars. The driver for searching for life on Mars is the findings supporting that ancient environments on Mars could have supported microbial life [1]. Despite the Martian surface having been cold and predominantly dry for at least the last three billion years (i.e., the Amazonian Period, immediately following the Hesperian), the subsurface could have sustained stable reservoirs of geothermally heated liquid water for the majority of this time. These conditions could represent a long-lived habitat that maintained hypothetical living cells [3,4,5,6]. The planetary mission, ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Rosalind Franklin, will collect and analyze samples in the subsurface, up to 2 m depth [7,8,9], to access places where organic molecules may be well preserved even after billions of years [10]
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