Perseverance Rover Studies Rock That Could Help Answer Past Mars Life Question

Space.com

A rock sample collected by  the Mars Perseverance rover could help answer the question of "whether Mars was home to microscopic life," according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Transcript

00:00Our first reaction on the team when we saw this rock was like, whoa, what is that?

00:05What could have caused that?

00:08Sample 25 is called Sapphire Canyon.

00:10This is a core that was collected from the Cheyava Falls Rock in Nuretva Valis.

00:16The Cheyava Falls Rock is really neat.

00:19If you look at it, it's got all sorts of cool features.

00:21It has these small black spots that we call poppy seeds and also these larger spots that

00:28we call leopard spots.

00:30This is the only place we've found on Mars so far where we have chemical evidence that

00:36chemical reactions associated with life could have been happening, as well as organic molecules.

00:42The Sherlock instrument detected an organic signature, so both of those together in the

00:46same rock is really compelling because these similar types of features, when we find them

00:51on Earth, oftentimes they're associated with biology, with microbes, and so those pieces

00:56of evidence combined together, we believe justify calling it a potential biosignature.

01:02I would describe the Sapphire Canyon sample as mysterious because we see these signatures

01:09that tell us chemistry has happened, potentially involving organics, but what does that mean?

01:16Could life have been involved or something that didn't involve life at all?

01:19We're not going to know until we bring that sample back and do some more measurements.

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