The discovery of boron in the Gale Crater on Mars has given scientists a clue to the potential of life having once existed on the Red Planet.

"Because borates may play an important role in making RNA—one of the building blocks of life—finding boron on Mars further opens the possibility that life could have once arisen on the planet," said Patrick Gasda, a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico and lead author of a paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters.

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The discovery, made in December 2016, marks the second confirmation of boron on the Martian surface. The first came in 2013, when scientists discovered boron in Martian meteorite. The find in Gale Crater, which NASA calls a "fascinating place to explore because of the mountain of layered materials in the middle," marked the first time the substance has been actually detected on Mars.

RNA, ribonucleic acid, is present in every living thing we know of. Several scientists, including co-discoverer of DNA Francis Crick, have advocated a theory known as an "RNA world," in which RNA was the initial starting point of life. The theory goes that the original proto-life was made of individual RNA strands that held genetic information and could self-replicate. When boron is dissolved in water, which was also believed to have existed at one point on Mars, it can stabilize with a sugar called ribose long enough to create RNA.

Of course, there are a whole lot of ifs here. There still isn't any evidence of life on Mars. But boron was only discovered four years ago and confirmed just last year. The search is only getting started, and plans to continue in 2020 and beyond, if we can get a sample of Martian soil back to Earth.

Source: AGU

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