Personally, I feel confident that there is life...

Personally, I feel confident that there is life on Mars, even near the surface. However, I expect it to be pretty sparse. On Earth, it seems to be the case that life is less prevalent, or at least more difficult to find, in harsh environments. I would think the Atacama is perhaps like a Garden of Eden compared to typical environments on Mars.

What might be interesting is if the potentially organic signature varies widely in different TEGA runs. That might suggest that the organic material occurs in concentrated "lumps." Which is what one would expect if it depended on whether an occasional organism was captured in the sample or not.

Those apparently moving orange blobs that Horton captured in his OM animation are intriguing. They seem to be about 100 microns in length, are they? It sure would be nice to get an AFM image of one.