Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

The Red Planet as seen by Europe’s Mars Express.
Image credit: ESA/D. O’Donnell – CC BY-SA IGO

Future missions dedicated to searching for live today on Mars will require a clear understanding of the organic biosignature degradation processes in the planet’s shallow icy subsurface.

“We found that amino acids in the surface ice on Mars would survive over 50 million years of cosmic ray exposure, which is far greater than the expected age of the current surface ice deposits on Mars,” reports Alexander Pavlov of the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Sampling location

Pavlov and colleagues explain that, based on their experiments, “locations with pure ice or ice-dominated permafrost would be the best places to look for recently deposited amino acids on Mars and, thus, should be considered as a target sampling location for future Mars missions searching for extant life.”

Image credit: ESA

The research — “Slow Radiolysis of Amino Acids in Mars-Like Permafrost Conditions: Applications to the Search for Extant Life on Mars” — has been published in the September 2025 issue of Astrobiology.

High chance of survival

Ice deposits on Mars have sublimated and continue to sublimate from low and mid-latitudes and redeposit in the polar regions of the Red Planet.

“Thus, any surface ice was exposed to ionizing radiation for a few million years. Therefore, if an abiotic or biological amino acid were deposited in the surface ice matrix on Mars somehow (e.g., spores or interplanetary dust particles), it would have a high chance of survival,” Pavlov and team members point out.

Mars expedition probes the promise that Mars was a home address for past, possibly life today.
Credit: NASA

Based on the results of this study, locations with pure ice and ice-dominated permafrost should be the best places to look for recently deposited amino acids on Mars, they conclude.

Buried water that freezes and does not melt in summer is called permafrost, common here on Earth in polar regions on Earth. On Mars it is planet wide.

To access the full paper — “Slow Radiolysis of Amino Acids in Mars-Like Permafrost Conditions: Applications to the Search for Extant Life on Mars” – go to:

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15311074251366249