
The space agency’s
Indeed, regions on
In the image below, you can see the novel Martian structures NASA scientists observed in this rock. They’re white splotches surrounded by black halos dubbed “leopard spots.”
“These spots are a big surprise,” David Flannery, an astrobiologist at the Queensland University of Technology and member of the Perseverance science team, said in a statement. “On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface.”
That’s quite an intriguing connection. These spots are formed by chemical reactions on

Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU / MSSS
NASA planetary scientists are certainly excited.
“As a rock geek/scientist and as the Director of @NASAJPL — this is the kind of discovery you hope for — where mind-bending observations make your heart beat just a little faster,” NASA’s Laurie Leshin
“This is more than intriguing, it’s really exciting! We must bring that sample to Earth for analysis in our best labs!” Rosaly Lopes, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
But, of course, the space agency has also tempered expectations until more is known. Non-biological processes could have created the leopard splotches, such as mineral deposits from past flows of water. In the announcement, the agency included the helpful graphic below, showing the Confidence of Life Detection scale, or CoLD. With this detection, NASA is at number one.

Credit: NASA / Aaron Gronstal
And, crucially, to move up the scale, the sample (from a rock named Cheyava Falls) must be closely analyzed in labs on Earth, with far more instruments than the distant, car-sized rover can carry. This can prove if non-biological factors actually formed the structures, confirm the presence of past life, rule out other hypotheses, and beyond. NASA’s
Until then, these compelling structures will largely remain just that.
“We have