NASA's Mysterious Announcement: "Clearest Sign Of Life That We've Ever Found On Mars"

A mysterious and pre-teased NASA conference from the Perseverance team has gone live and announced their findings: the "clearest sign of life that we've ever found on Mars".

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Earlier this week, NASA pre-trailed an "exciting" announcement coming from the Perseverance rover team. The release was light on what would be announced, but now we have an answer. 

"For the last 30 years, NASA has been exploring Mars. And in that exploration we're looking for signs of life, we're looking for water," acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said during the press conference.

"And in the past we thought we found signs of life. And when we did that we put it out to the scientific community and the scientific community would come back and say 'well listen, there's different explanations for what you think was life. Actually, it was created by something else'."

That, apparently, isn't the case with the latest work.

"A year ago, we found a sample," he added. "We thought we found what we believe to be signs of microbial life on the Mars surface. So we put it out to our scientific friends to pressure test it, to analyze it and go 'did we get this right, do we think [these are] signs of ancient life on Mars?'."

"After a year of review, they have come back and said 'listen, we can't find another explanation. This very well could be the clearest sign of life that we've ever found on Mars."

"It really is an exciting day today. [...] [W]ithin 10 light-years of Earth, there are at least 400 known planets. That means there is a possibility, some would even say a probability, of life beyond Earth, including maybe even complex intelligent life," Associate Administrator Nicky Fox added.

"Today, we are really showing you how we are one step closer to answering humanity's, one of their most profound questions, and that is, are we truly alone in the universe?"

Displaying an image of spots found on a rock in the mudstone in Mars's "Cheyava Falls", Fox said that scientists "immediately" knew it was interesting.

"We hadn't seen anything like that before on Mars, and we talked about it last summer," she continued. "They've done the analysis on these leopard spots, and we, you know, we think they are potentially made by some sort of ancient life. This finding by our incredible Perseverance rover is the closest we've actually come to discovering ancient life on Mars."

More can be read about the story in our piece Exciting Martian Mudstone Has Features That Might Be Considered Biosignatures. Skepticism should of course be sky high, but potentially we may have our first signs of ancient, alien life.