Detection and Preservation of Biosignatures in Mars Analogs Hot Spring Deposits from the Taupo Volcanic Zone, New Zealand

The search for traces of past life is one of the driving goals of Mars exploration. On Earth, silica-rich rocks, including hot spring deposits, are targets with high biosignature preservation potential and similarities have been drawn between those and opaline and hydrated silica on Mars. Characterizing the preservation potential of biosignatures in martian hot spring analogs is thus essential to help target and improve their detection by the future martian rovers. Here we characterize the nature and distribution of organic molecules including lipid biomarkers, evaluate their preservation potential and determine potential signals from flight-like experiments. We focus on five geothermal fields in the New Zealand Taupo Volcanic Zone with physical and chemical variabilities. Samples were extracted for lipid biomarker analysis and analyzed using flight-like experiments from the current and future pyrolyzer-gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer instruments SAM and MOMA on the Curiosity and Exomars2020 rovers. This investigation will improve our knowledge on the preservation of biosignatures in various hot spring martian analog environments and help us evaluate the potential limits and biases of flight experiments.