NASA says it may have found clearest sign of life on Mars

NATIONWIDE — NASA announced on Wednesday that its Perseverance Mars rover may have found signs of ancient microbial life on the red planet.

During a teleconference on Wednesday morning, acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy shared that NASA might have discovered signs of microbial life on the Red Planet.

“A year ago, we thought we found what we believed to be signs of microbial life on the Mars’ surface,” Duffy shared.

After a year, NASA released a scientific paper that stated this sample could be the clearest signs of life on ancient Mars, Duffy said.

The sample was discovered in an ancient dry riverbed in the Jezero Crater that was taken from a rock named Cheyava Falls.

“Taken from a rock named ‘Cheyava Falls’ last year, the sample, called ‘Sapphire Canyon,’ contains potential biosignatures, according to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature,” NASA stated in a press release.

NASA’s Science Mission Directorate Associate Administrator Nicky Fox called the rock where the sample came from “leopard spotted” and revealed what the U.S. space agency’s scientists discovered about the sample.

“They’ve done the analysis on the Leopard spots and we think they are potentially made by some sort of ancient life. … It’s a signature. It’s sort of a leftover sign, it’s not life itself. And it certainly could have been from ancient life and that would have been billions of years ago,” she said.

She stressed that this is not current and may be billions of years old. Based on life on Earth, Fox described how this signature, or sample, may have come about.

“In this case, it’s kind of the equivalent of seeing leftover fossils, leftovers from a meal, and maybe that meal has been excreted by a microbe and that’s what we’re seeing in this sample,” she said.

Perseverance, which was launched in 2020, came to Cheyava Falls in July 2024 to explore a set of rocky outgroups called “Bright Angel.”

“The combination of chemical compounds we found in the Bright Angel formation could have been a rich source of energy for microbial metabolisms,” said Perseverance scientist Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University, New York and lead author of the paper. “But just because we saw all these compelling chemical signatures in the data didn’t mean we had a potential biosignature. We needed to analyze what that data could mean.”

Hurowitz was also at the press conference on Wednesday morning.

Fox stressed that more testing needs to be done.

Duffy said NASA is looking at methods, budgets and timing to figure out how to get the sample back to Earth so it can be properly studied in a laboratory.

Earlier this year, a proposed budget cut from the Trump administration suggested axing  the Mars Sample Return mission, a joint NASA and European Space Agency campaign to send Martian soil and rock samples collected by the rovers back to Earth.

The budget justifies this decision by stating if American astronauts are on Mars, they can collect the samples themselves and return them to Earth.

Duffy said officials need to look at the costs and resources on getting the samples back to Earth and says he believes there is a better and faster way in doing so. However, he did not say what those ways are, and officials are still figuring out a new method.

Duffy did suggest “boots on the ground” as one of the collection methods.

Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance Project scientist, described the location of where the sample was discovered as an ancient lake.

“Jezero (crater) is also indisputably the site of an ancient lake, which we know because we have two river valleys entering into the crater and a river valley exiting the crater through which water flowed out of the crater,” she said.