It’s an age-old question. Was there ever life on Mars?
Earth just got closer to an answer — maybe.
A rover built and managed in Southern California, with a mission to understand the Red Planet has lived up to its name.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover — built and managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge — collected a rock sample that NASA leaders say offers the best signs yet that ancient Mars harbored some form of life, authorities said Wednesday.
The sample, called “Sapphire Canyon,” was collected from an ancient dry riverbed in one of the planet’s craters, showing signs of microbial life, according to a paper published Wednesday, in the journal Nature.
The biosignatures collected last year aren’t exactly household names: There’s your “millimeter-scale reaction fronts enriched in ferrous iron phosphate and sulfide minerals, likely vivianite and greigite, respectively.”
Put another way, the rover found signatures of two iron-rich minerals: vivianite (hydrated iron phosphate) and greigite (iron sulfide).
According to JPL, Vivianite is frequently found on Earth in sediments, peat bogs, and around decaying organic matter. Certain forms of microbial life on Earth can also produce greigite.
“The combination of chemical compounds we found in the Bright Angel formation could have been a rich source of energy for microbial metabolisms,” said Perseverance scientist Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University, New York and lead author of the paper.
The rover’s science instruments found that the structure’s sedimentary rocks on Mars are composed of clay and silt.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because on Earth, clay and silt are excellent preservers of past microbial life. They also are rich in organic carbon, sulfur, oxidized iron (rust), and phosphorous, officials said.
Roaming Mars since 2021, the rover cannot directly detect life, past or present. Instead, it carries a drill to penetrate rocks and tubes to hold the samples gathered from places judged most suitable for hosting life billions of years ago. The samples are awaiting retrieval to Earth — an ambitious plan that’s on hold as NASA seeks cheaper, quicker options.
Still, the significance is stunning, NASA officials said.
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy called the find “the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars.”
“The identification of a potential biosignature on the red planet is a groundbreaking discovery, and one that will advance our understanding of Mars,” Duffy said in a statement. “NASA’s commitment to conducting Gold Standard Science will continue as we pursue our goal of putting American boots on Mars’ rocky soil.”
NASA officials noted that the biosignature is a substance or structure that “might have a biological origin,”so the sample will still need to undergo more thorough research to verify a finding of life.
“But just because we saw all these compelling chemical signatures in the data didn’t mean we had a potential biosignature,” Hurowitz said. “We needed to analyze what that data could mean.”
Nevertheless, the possibilities were intriguing, officials said.
JPL scientists say the discovery was particularly surprising because of the relative youth of the sedimentary rocks the mission had been investigating.
Earlier theories posited that signs of ancient life would be confined to older rock formations, according to JPL.
But with the new discovery could mean Mars could have been habitable for a longer time or later in the planet’s history than previously thought, and that older rocks also might hold signs of life that are simply harder to detect.
“Astrobiological claims, particularly those related to the potential discovery of past extraterrestrial life, require extraordinary evidence,” said Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Getting such a significant finding as a potential biosignature on Mars into a peer-reviewed publication is a crucial step in the scientific process because it ensures the rigor, validity, and significance of our results. And while abiotic explanations for what we see at Bright Angel are less likely given the paper’s findings, we cannot rule them out.”
The find comes at a pivotal time for NASA and JPL.
JPL announced late last year its second major round of layoff in nine months, cutting more than 300 jobs—approximately 5% of its workforce—to address budgetary constraints.
At the time, it affected 325 positions across nearly all sectors, including technical, project, business and support, JPL said in a statement.
Calling the cuts “painful but necessary adjustments,” JPL said the reductions are essentially to help it stay within its FY 2025 budget while continuing its work for NASA and the nation.
Those cuts follows JPL’s layoff of 530 employees in February, which included 40 contractors, as part of a lab-wide cost-cutting measure.
The February layoff, which represented around 8% of JPL’s total workforce, was largely in response to a projected $300 million budget reduction from NASA — a 63% drop from the previous year – primarily impacting the Mars Sample Return mission, a program focused on bringing Martian samples to earth for analysis.
Earlier this year, the White House lauded what it describes as $1 billion in new investments regarding Mars-focused programs, but an overall $6 billion reduction.
According to the White House website, the proposed NASA budget for FY 2026 streamlined the NASA workforce, but it drew sharp rebukes for its cuts from members of the local congressional delegation.
On Wednesday, Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, saw the find as validation for NASA’s strategy.
“This finding is the direct result of NASA’s effort to strategically plan, develop, and execute a mission able to deliver exactly this type of science — the identification of a potential biosignature on Mars,” Fox said.