NASA’s Perseverance rover has found a rock on Mars that may indicate ancient life.

NASA’s Perseverance rover has been collecting samples from Mars since 2021, but one rock it recently collected could help it achieve its goal of finding evidence of ancient life on the planet. The 3.2-foot-long, 2-foot-wide sample is nicknamed Shiawa Falls after the tallest waterfall in the Grand Canyon, and contains “chemical signatures and structures” that could have been present on Mars. Formed from ancient microbial life Billions of years ago.

Perseverance collected the rock on July 21 from what was once a Martian river valley carved by flowing water long ago. The sample, which you can see up close below and farther away in the center of the image above, shows large white veins of calcium sulfate running along its length. These veins indicate that water once flowed through the rock.

More significantly, the planet has millimeter-sized markings that look like “tiger spots” all around its central red stripe. On our planet, these spots would form in terrestrial sedimentary rocks when chemical reactions turn hematite, one of the minerals responsible for Mars’ red color, white. These reactions could release iron and phosphate, which may have served as an energy source for the microbes.

The spacecraft’s PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) instrument has already determined that the dark rings surrounding the spots contain iron and phosphate. However, this does not automatically mean that the rock was a host to ancient microbes.

The spots may have formed through non-biological processes, something scientists will have to find out. “We can’t say yet that we’ve discovered life on Mars,” says Katie Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist. He said“But what we’re saying is that we have a potential biomarker, a set of features that may have a biological origin but need further study and more data.”

NASA has yet to return the samples collected by Perseverance to our planet, including Chiwafa Falls. New York times Note: The Mars Sample Return mission is years behind schedule and won’t be able to return rocks from the Red Planet until the 2040s instead of the early 2030s as originally planned. NASA recently announced I asked the aerospace companies Scientists are now looking for alternative solutions for how to get the samples back to Earth much sooner, and will fund their studies, which are scheduled to begin later this year. The scientists will also have to conduct extensive tests to rule out contamination, non-biological processes, and other possible explanations for how the leopard spots formed, before they can declare that they are indeed evidence of ancient life on Mars.