Perseverance Rover Finds Potential Sign of Ancient Life in Martian Rock

Today, NASA officials unveiled intriguing new findings from “Sapphire Canyon,” the 25th geological sample collected by the Perseverance Mars rover. This rock core has captivated scientists ever since Perseverance extracted it in July 2024, as it may help them determine if microbial life ever existed on the Red Planet.

Now, NASA has revealed that initial analysis of the Sapphire Canyon sample could not rule out a biological origin for its distinctive features. “This very well could be the clearest sign of life that we have ever found on Mars,” Sean Duffy, acting NASA administrator, said during a press briefing on Wednesday, September 10.

Participants also included Nicky Fox, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate; Lindsay Hays, senior scientist for Mars Exploration; Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance project scientist; and Joel Hurowitz, lead author of the study published today and a planetary scientist at Stony Brook University.

While the new findings, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, provide strong evidence to suggest Sapphire Canyon could hold a potential biosignature, “we don’t know for sure that’s what it is, and we won’t stop after this first analysis,” Fox clarified. It will require further research to confirm whether the sample’s features arose through biological processes.

Hunting for life in the Jezero Crater

Perseverance extracted the specimen from a vein-filled rock named “Cheyava Falls” located in Neretva Vallis, a river valley cut into the Martian surface by water rushing into the Jezero Crater billions of years ago. The rover has been exploring this 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer-wide) impact crater since February 2021 and has gathered 30 samples of rock and regolith for a potential return to Earth.

NASA scientists believe the ancient lake delta in Jezero Crater is the best place for Perseverance to hunt for signs of past microbial life, and Sapphire Canyon caught their attention as soon as the rover collected it. This sample features tiny black spots that NASA scientists call “poppy seeds” interspersed among larger “leopard” spots.

“These textural features told us that something really interesting had happened in these rocks, some chemical reaction had occurred at the time they were being deposited,” Hurowitz explained during the briefing. The spots could have been left behind by microbial life if it had used organic compounds—carbon, sulfur, and phosphorus—as an energy source.

The search for chemical clues

To look for those compounds, Hurowitz and his colleagues analyzed data that Perseverance gathered using its SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instrument, which revealed what’s known as a G-band. Hurowitz described it as a “smoking gun indicator” for the presence of organic material.

The team then used Perseverance’s PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) to map the surface chemistry of Cheyava Falls. This uncovered a distinct pattern of minerals arranged into reaction fronts—points of contact where chemical and physical reactions occur—that corresponded to the leopard spots. The spots carried the signature of two iron-rich minerals: vivianite and greigite.

“When we see features like this in sediment on Earth, these minerals are often the byproduct of microbial metabolisms that are consuming organic matter and making these minerals as a result of those reactions,” Hurowitz explained. “But there are non-biological ways to make these features that we cannot completely rule out on the basis of the data that we collected with our rover payload,” he added.

Next step: get Sapphire Canyon back to Earth

To confirm a biological origin for Sapphire Canyon’s spots, we need to bring the sample back to Earth, Hurowitz said. NASA and the European Space Agency are developing a multi-mission campaign to retrieve Perseverance’s samples, but escalating costs and complexity have hindered progress.

Funding for the Mars Sample Return mission was not included in President Trump’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal. However, in July, the House Appropriations Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee allocated $300 million to continue MSR in FY2026. While the bill has not yet passed, here’s hoping the prospect of confirming a biosignature on Mars will encourage lawmakers to sustain funding for the mission.