NASA discovers 'clearest sign of life that we've ever found on Mars'

Rolling across the rugged, rusty red terrain on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover came upon some rocks with peculiar green, blue, black and white dots. After detailed image analysis, scientists have come to a potentially encouraging conclusion: If those speckled rocks were formed like they are on Earth, they might be evidence of past life on the dusty planet.

The rocks “very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting,” acting NASA administrator Sean P. Duffy said in a news conference Wednesday. The findings were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

The rocks, or mudstones, are composed of finely packed sediment and covered in specks resembling poppy seeds and leopard spots. The colorful features, the study found, are minerals that — on Earth — have traditionally been created from microbial activity.

The research team would need to investigate pieces of the rocks in person to confirm if a Martian microbe was behind the unusual patterns. That’s far easier said than done. But Joel Hurowitz, lead author of the study, called the rocks “probably the most astrobiologically exciting” samples identified by the Perseverance rover since it landed on Mars in 2021.

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