Microhabitats on Mars: the case of a biomorphic ovoid structure in Nakhla Martian meteorite

Elias Chatzitheodoridis

Visiting Researcher at ESTEC/ESA (coming from National Technical Univeristy of Athens, Greece)

There are currently many efforts to assess the habitability and search for life on Mars. When doing so we should not forget the potential that meteorites represent for this kind of investigation, because they can already contain microhabitats that may have once hosted Martian life. In this presentation we present such a microhabitat, the only that has been discovered till now in a Martian meteorite. This is a clay structure, and we analyse its geochemical environment and examine the specimen for the presence of water, energy, and suitable organic compounds. The specimen fulfils the above parameters for a microhabitat, specifically the presence of organics that may potentially be related to life, we used state-of-the-art techniques to conduct a single cell sequencing analysis on two selected subsamples of the ovoid. Although results were negative for Martian indigenous life, the methodology we have used shows that it is working and could be potentially interesting to be applied on samples that are returned with the Mars Sampling Return missions.