Progressi nello studio della vita su Marte

The search for signs of life on Mars is a focal point of planetary science. The exploration of life on Mars began with the Viking experiments on Mars (1976) and continued with the analysis of the Martian meteorite ALH84001 (1996) and the subsequent reassessment of the Viking data, which underlined the possibility of life on the present-day Mars (2012). A few months ago, an article by Hurowitz et al. (Nature, September 10, 2025) reported with great emphasis the discovery of biominerals such as vivianite and greigite on Mars. This fits into a large body of evidence that has emerged over the past 15 years, among which, we can recall the morphological observations and fractal analyses of microstructures present in Martian outcrops that are deeply reminiscent of microbialites/stromatolites, as well as microalgae, even reaching with mathematical analyses high levels of significance (p<0.001). There's no doubt that most of the scientific community involved in this type of study still don't believe we have the "smoking gun" that would lead us to assess there was life on Mars in the past or in the present. Nonetheless, there's no doubt that the body of evidence supporting Martian life is accumulating, necessitating investigations aimed at searching for it on the Red Planet. The European Space Agency's ill-fated "Exo-Mars" is the latest recent attempt in this direction.