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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