09/12/2025
🚨BREAKING: NASA may have just found life on Mars.
Billions of years ago, a river flowed into a Martian lake. Now, at the edge of that ancient riverbed, a red rock full of strange, ring-shaped patterns may hold the clearest evidence yet that life once existed on the Red Planet.
NASA’s Perseverance rover collected the sample – nicknamed Cheyava Falls – from a region called Bright Angel inside Jezero Crater, a dried-up lakebed scientists have explored since 2021. The rock is a fine-grained mudstone, formed between 3.2 and 3.8 billion years ago at the bottom of a lake.
What makes this find extraordinary are two minerals inside the sample: vivianite and greigite. On Earth, both form when microbes interact with mud, iron, sulfur, and phosphorus – essential ingredients for life. These minerals, plus the rock's high levels of organic carbon, suggest that microbial life could have once thrived in Mars’s ancient waters.
The rock also shows mysterious dark spots and concentric rings – nicknamed “leopard spots” – that researchers believe could have formed as a byproduct of microbial metabolism. While non-biological processes could also explain these features, scientists say they have no better theory yet.
“We can’t find another explanation,” said NASA’s Acting Administrator Sean Duffy. “This very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars – which is incredibly exciting.”
Still, this isn’t confirmation of life. NASA officials were careful to say it’s a potential biosignature – a clue that might point to life, but needs more data. Definitive proof can only come if the sample – now sealed inside the rover – is one day brought back to Earth for deeper analysis.
There’s just one problem: the future of that Mars Sample Return mission is uncertain. Budget cuts could delay or even cancel it. But with a find like this, the scientific community is pushing hard to make sure it happens.
Read the study:
"Redox-driven mineral and organic associations in Jezero Crater, Mars." Nature, 10 Sep 2025.
