Scientists Find More Traces of Life on Martian Meteorites

British astronomers said Thursday that they had found evidence to back reports from U.S. scientists that they had found traces of life in a meteorite from Mars.

They said samples from two Martian meteorites showed traces that could have been left by living organisms, and one was recent enough to indicate that there still could be life somewhere on Mars.

“We have identified a second meteorite which appears to contain matter that we define as organic,” Colin Pillinger, an astronomer at Britain’s Open University, said at a news conference.

Pillinger said his team had also taken a second look at a sample from the meteorite--known as ALH84001--that the U.S. space agency NASA said contained traces of life.

That sample, he said, contained traces of a carbon isotope--a variant of carbon--that is often formed by microscopic life forms on Earth.

“These pieces don’t actually say that there was definitively life on Mars, but they tend to redress the balance,” Pillinger said.

NASA said tiny traces in its sample of ALH84001 could have been left by tiny bacteria.

Since then, others have questioned that finding, some saying the little holes in the ancient Mars rock seemed to have been formed at temperatures too extreme for life to survive.

But Pillinger said his group’s findings added weight to NASA’s claim. The carbon isotope, carbon 12, is found in methane on Earth produced by tiny bacteria that live in places such as the stomachs of cows and rice paddies.

NASA’s meteorite is believed to have been knocked off Mars by an asteroid and thrown into orbit 16 million years ago.

The second sample, known as EETA79001, is much younger and could be only 600,000 years old.

“This throws it into a time when life would have been teeming on Earth,” Pillinger said.

“Geologically speaking, this is sufficiently recent for there to be a good chance that life might still exist in protected areas on our planetary neighbor.”