Scientists at the University of Tennessee are working as part of a NASA team searching for life on Mars.

They are not looking for actual living organisms, but are focused on finding evidence that the environment on Mars could have ever supported conditions necessary for life as we know it.

Now the team may have stumbled upon some new evidence with photographs of martian mineral "ice cream sandwiches" on the surface of the red planet.

"My son is 10 years old and loves looking over my shoulder when I'm controlling the rover," said Linda Kah, a professor at the University of Tennessee and member of the Curiosity science team.

"When he saw these pictures, he was the one who said they look like ice cream sandwiches. You see these raised veins with a white stripe and it has dark on one side and dark on the other. It's incredibly exciting. This is the first time we've seen veins that have distinctly different minerals in them."

Kah added that white stripe is likely gypsum and they are yet to determine the dark mineral deposits.

"If you think of hot springs, you have hot fluids that are coming up from underground and producing a unique environment. But there's a lot of life that lives in that environment. And so these fractures may also represent fluids that have come up from deep within that might allow small environments where life could live," said Kah. "The purpose of the Curiosity mission is to try to discover if environments on Mars might have been suitable for life."

It is notable that the existence of fluids do not always mean life existed on Mars, it however sends a message that the Red Planet might had conditions that were right to support life.

"These distinctly different minerals, that's telling us something new. And we don't necessarily know what it is yet. But it's incredibly exciting to have my student and myself basically leading the charge on the analysis of these veins," said Kah."It's exciting and important because we really start to examine what it is that allows life to live in a certain place. And this is a question that goes beyond anyone's belief of how life first appeared. This goes beyond to ask how does life remain some place. Why is the Earth special and has continued having life, whereas Mars, our next door neighbor, is pretty much absent of life now?"