NASA released a significant update from the Perseverance Mars rover on Sept. 10, focusing on a particularly juicy tidbit for those watching from home: A small rock sample called Sapphire Canyon showed signs of potential biosignatures, or ancient alien life that may have once grown on Mars.
That’s possible because of the unique location where Perseverance located the sample in July 2024. It came from a rock named Cheyava Falls. This particular rock is in Jezero Crater, home to an ancient dry riverbed. In other words, water once flowed abundantly in this spot, one of the most essential requirements for life as we know it.
While exploring, Perseverance’s cameras picked up colorful, leopard-like spots that eventually led to the Sapphire Canyon discovery.
When CNET reached out to NASA to understand just what this discovery means, Dr. Becky McCauley Rench, NASA Astrobiology Program Scientist provided valuable info. “Whether we are alone in the universe is one of the most important questions for NASA to answer,” Dr. Rench told us. “The current surface environment of Mars is not hospitable for life as we know it. However, if we do determine that Mars indeed hosted life in the deep past, it would increase the possibility that some form of life has survived to the present day in subsurface habitats.”
