And it stresses why samples need to be sent back to Earth.
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00:00Was there ever life living on Mars?
00:05That's the question NASA rovers have been trying to decipher for years, but now, according
00:09to a new study, there may be a simple explanation as to why we have yet to find any evidence
00:13of such a thing.
00:14Our instruments just aren't good enough.
00:16The recent study sought to determine whether or not the instrumentation that our rovers
00:20currently have equipped on Mars can even detect life in a place we already know it exists
00:24on Earth.
00:25Researchers went out to Chile's Atacama Desert to the ancient Redstone Delta.
00:29The area is quite similar to the landscape of Mars, making it the perfect spot for the
00:33experiment.
00:34And after gathering aged samples and looking at their genetic sequences, they discovered
00:37something odd.
00:389% of the genetic material couldn't be classified at all.
00:42Meanwhile, a further 40% was simply classified as some form of genetic material, meaning
00:47it's incredibly hard for those instruments to determine materials that haven't already
00:50been classified.
00:51And on an alien planet, we likely have no idea what life would look like at all.
00:55The researchers are now calling this class of unidentified genetics the Dark Microbiome,
01:00with the researchers concluding in their study, quote, similarly low levels of organics will
01:04be hard, if not impossible to detect in Martian rocks, depending on the instruments and technique
01:09used.