NASA Discovery Is the "Closest We Have Ever Come to Discovering Life on Mars"

TIME

When the Perseverance rover landed in Mars’s Jezero crater—a formation that long ago was Jezero lake—in February, 2021 it turned west. West is where the riverbeds, the deltas, the sites of ancient gushing water once were. In July, 2024, after covering 18 miles in nearly three and a half years, it arrived at a quarter-mile-wide river valley that is home to a 3.2-ft.-long rock NASA scientists have dubbed Cheyava Falls—and there it hit paydirt. As a new paper in Nature reports, a sample Perseverance drilled from the rock may contain potential biosignatures of long ago microbial life.

Transcript

00:00So we're talking about Perseverance. This was a mission sent to Mars under President Trump's

00:05first presidency. And a year ago, we found a sample, and it was, again, we're exploring in

00:12places where there were rivers and where there were lakes. And much as on Earth, we think that

00:19that's where we'd see signs of ancient life on Mars. And so a year ago, we thought we found

00:26what we believe to be signs of microbial life on the Mars surface. And so we put it out to our

00:34scientific friends to pressure test it, to analyze it, and go, did we get this right? Do we think

00:40this is signs of ancient life on Mars? And after a year of review, they've come back and they said,

00:50listen, we can't find another explanation. So this very well could be the clearest sign

00:56of life that we've ever found on Mars. And today, we are really showing you how we are

01:01kind of one step closer to answering humanity's, one of their most profound questions, and that

01:08is, are we truly alone in the universe? They've done the analysis on these leopard spots, and

01:14we, you know, we think they are potentially made by some sort of ancient life. This finding

01:21by our incredible Perseverance rover is the closest we've actually come to discovering

01:25ancient life on Mars. And if you can't tell, we're really excited about that.

01:31And but you know, I also again, I want to put it into context. It's a signature. It's a sort of

01:37leftover sign. It's not life itself. And it certainly could have been from ancient life. And that would

01:44have been something that was there billions of years ago, nothing that's current there. And what that

01:48means is we look at everything we know about life on Earth. And this is the kind of signature that we

01:56would see that was made by something biological. In this case, it's kind of the equivalent of seeing

02:02like leftover fossils, you know, leftovers from a meal. And maybe that meal has been excreted by a

02:08microbe. And that's what we're seeing in this sample. And you know, again, as Secretary Duffy said,

02:15we don't know for sure, that's what it is. And we won't stop after this first analysis. This

02:21certainly is not the final answer. And what's exciting about these finds this this sort of

02:26combination of mud and organic matter that has reacted to produce these minerals and these textures,

02:33is that when we see features like this in sediment on Earth, these minerals are often the byproduct of

02:40microbial metabolisms that are consuming organic matter and making these minerals as a result of

02:46those reactions. But there are non-biological ways to make these features that we cannot completely rule

02:55out on the basis of the data that we collected with our rover payload. So what we need to do from here is

03:02to continue to do additional research in laboratory settings here on Earth, and ultimately bring the sample

03:09that we collected from this rock back home to Earth so that we can make the final determination for what

03:14process actually gave rise to these fantastic textures.

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