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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Rock discovery contains ‘clearest sign’ yet of ancient life on
Mars, NASA says
By Ashley Strickland, CNN
Updated:
2:44 PM EDT, Wed September 10, 2025
Source: CNN
Scientists believe intriguing leopard spots on a rock sampled by the
Perseverance rover on Mars last year may have potentially been made by
ancient life, NASA announced Wednesday. The team has also published a
peer-reviewed paper in the journal about the new analysis, though they
say further study is needed.
“After a year of review, they have come back and they said, listen,
we can’t find another explanation,” said Acting NASA Administrator
Sean Duffy. “So this very well could be the clearest sign of life
that we’ve ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting.”
The sample, called Sapphire Canyon, was collected by the Perseverance
rover from rocky outcrops on the edges of the Neretva Vallis river
valley, a region sculpted by water that once flowed into Jezero Crater
more than 3 billion years ago. The rover landed within the crater to
explore the ancient lake site in February 2021, seeking rocks created
or modified by water on Mars in the past.
Perseverance drilled the Sapphire Canyon sample from an
arrowhead-shaped rock called Cheyava Falls in July 2024.
Although the sample is safely ensconced in a tube millions of miles
away on Mars, scientists have remained intrigued by the rock because of
its potential to reveal whether microscopic life ever existed on Mars.
“The discovery of a potential biosignature, or a feature or signature
that could be consistent with biological processes, but that requires
further work and study to confirm a biological origin is something that
we’re sharing with you all today that grows from years of hard work,
dedication and collaboration between over 1,000 scientists and
engineers here at the (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory and our partner
institutions around the country and internationally,” said Katie
Stack Morgan, Perseverance project scientist at JPL, during a news
conference Wednesday.
Shortly after the rock was found, members of the Perseverance science
team said it was exactly the type of rock they were hoping to find.
NASA initially shared the Cheyava Falls rock discovery at the end of
July 2024.
The new announcement Wednesday is the result of a long, peer-reviewed
research process and the collection of more data, said lead study
author Joel Hurowitz, a planetary scientist at Stony Brook University
in New York.
Peer review and publication are crucial steps in the scientific process
that allow NASA to make the mission data and the science team’s
interpretation of that data available to the broader science community
for further study, said Lindsay Hays, senior scientist for Mars
Exploration at NASA’s Planetary Science Division.
“Hopefully, eventually this will be followed by the delivery of these
samples back to Earth where they could be studied in terrestrial
labs,” Hays added.
Perseverance rover surveyed the river valley after finding the sample
to better understand the environment where the rocks were deposited and
determine how the leopard spots may have formed, Hurowitz said.
Understanding exactly how those spots came to be — whether through
geochemical processes that don’t require life, or due to the presence
of microbial life — is a crucial step in determining whether the rock
contains evidence of a potential biosignature.
“Today, we are really showing you how we are kind of one step closer
to answering humanity’s, one of their most profound questions, and
that is, are we truly alone in the universe?” said Nicky Fox,
associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
Investigating Cheyava Falls
More than 3.5 billion years ago, Neretva Vallis would have been filled
with rushing rivers carrying mud, sand and gravel into the lake, Stack
Morgan said.
“Inside the crater, this kind of energetic setting was probably
punctuated by periods of calm when water would have backed up, creating
a relatively low energy lake environment,” she added.
When the water eventually dried up, it left behind the rocky outcrop
where Cheyava Valls was found, called Bright Angel, preserving a record
of a “potential habitable environment” on Mars, Stack Morgan said.
“These really ancient rocks provide us the window into a period of
time that’s not particularly well represented on our own planet
Earth, but it’s a time when life was emergent on Earth, and could
have been on Mars as well,” she added.
Cheyava Falls, named for one of the Grand Canyon’s waterfalls,
showcased small black spots nicknamed “poppy seeds” by
Perseverance’s science team, as well as larger markings dubbed
leopard spots.
“These textural features told us that something really interesting
had happened in these rocks, some chemical reactions occurred at the
time they were being deposited,” Hurowitz said.
The rover’s SHERLOC instrument, or Scanning Habitable Environments
with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals, also detected
organic compounds in the rock.
The SHERLOC results were a “smoking gun indicator for the presence of
organic matter in this mud,” Hurowitz said. Organic compounds were
also found in a couple of other locations in the Bright Angel
formation.
“This tells us that we had a rusty red mud that was deposited in the
presence of organic matter,” Hurowitz said.
On Earth, these carbon-based molecules are the building blocks of life.
The mottling on the rock could indicate that ancient chemical reactions
occurring within it once supported microbial organisms.
White veins of calcium sulfate present clear evidence that water —
crucial for life — once ran through the rock. And the
irregular-shaped leopard spots, tested by the rover’s PIXL
instrument, short for Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry,
detected iron and phosphate within the features.
The team also spotted the potential presence of hematite between the
white bands of calcium sulfate in the rock. Hematite is one of the
minerals responsible for Mars’ signature red hue. The leopard
spotting may have occurred when chemical reactions with hematite turned
the rock from red to white, which can release iron and phosphate and
potentially cause the black rings to form. Such reactions can also
provide an energy source for microbes.
The features are likely due to the presence of ferrous iron phosphate
and iron sulfide, or the minerals vivianite and greigite, according to
the researchers. Typically, these minerals form in environments with a
low temperature and the presence of water.
“On Earth, things like these sometimes form in sediments where
microbes are eating organic matter and ‘breathing’ rust and
sulfate,” said study coauthor Dr. Michael Tice, a geobiologist and
astrobiologist in the department of geology and geophysics at Texas A&M
University, in a statement. “Their presence on Mars raises the
question: could similar processes have occurred there?”
Getting proof of life
In the study, the authors explore two potential scenarios for how the
rock features formed: due to the presence of life or without it.
While it’s possible that some of the features could be produced
strictly geochemically due to reactions between organic matter and
iron, that process usually only works at relatively high temperatures
— something the team does not see evidence of, Tice said.
“All the ways we have of examining these rocks on the rover suggest
that they were never heated in a way that could produce the leopard
spots and poppy seeds,” Tice explained. “If that’s the case, we
have to seriously consider the possibility that they were made by
creatures like bacteria living in the mud in a Martian lake more than
three billion years ago.”
Cheyava Falls may have begun as a mixture of deposited mud and organic
compounds that eventually cemented to become rock, according to the
research. Later on, water may have penetrated through cracks in the
rock, depositing minerals to create the calcium sulfate veins and
leopard spots.
“What’s exciting about these finds, this sort of combination of mud
and organic matter that has reacted to produce these minerals and these
textures, is that when we see features like this are often the
byproduct of microbial metabolisms that are consuming organic matter
and making these minerals as a result of those reactions,” Hurowitz
said.
Hurowitz also acknowledged that there are nonbiological ways to create
features like the leopard spots.
“What we need to do from here is to continue to do additional
research in laboratory settings here on Earth, and ultimately bring the
sample from this rock back home to Earth, so that we can make the final
determination for what process actually gave rise to these fantastic
textures,” he said.
Scientists are still in the process of analyzing the geologic context
of the sample, but the new paper represents an overview of how they
currently understand the Cheyava Falls rock, Stack Morgan said. More
papers are expected over the next year or so.
“While we were exploring the Bright Angel area, we basically threw
the entire rover science payload at this rock, and so we’re pretty
close to the limits of what the rover can do on the surface in terms of
making progress on that particular question,” Stack Morgan said.
Since landing on Mars, Perseverance has crossed Jezero Crater and
explored an ancient river delta in search of microfossils of past life.
The rover has been collecting samples along the way that were intended
to be returned to Earth by future missions.
But it’s currently unclear how NASA would return the samples to Earth
as the agency grapples with the White House’s proposal to by as much
as half.
“We’re looking at how we get the sample back, or other samples
back,” Duffy said. “What we’re going to do is look at our
budgets, we look at our timing, and you know, how do we spend money
better, and you know, what technology do we have to get samples back
more quickly? And so that’s a current analysis that’s happening
right now.”
To ultimately answer the question of whether life has ever existed on
the red planet, returning the samples is necessary, scientists say.
“Bringing this sample back to Earth would allow us to analyze it with
instruments far more sensitive than anything we can send to Mars,”
Tice said. “What’s fascinating is how life may have been making use
of some of the same processes on Earth and Mars at around the same
time. It’s a special and spectacular thing to be able to see them
like this on another planet.”
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