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
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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TechTranscript
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.
01:26or we also put into the