Alex McColgan

This is despite the National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey, a meeting of leading scientists who get together every 10 years to decide the future priorities for progress in STEM,

naming the Mars sample return as the highest priority for NASA two decades in a row.

And that was before we discovered this potential biosignature on our neighbouring planet.

All we can do is hope this puts political pressure on leaders to mobilise the necessary resources to pull it off.

So if we ever do get the Sapphire Canyon sample back home, what kind of experiments might scientists run

There's a good chance that, among other things, they'll be looking for two key fingerprints of life.

The first is chirality.

Amino acids come in two mirror image versions, right-handed and left-handed, also known as D and L amino acids.

On Earth, life overwhelmingly prefers the L version of things.

while non-living materials show more of a 50-50 split.

If the Martian sample shows a significant chiral preference, either right or left handed, that could be a smoking gun.

The second fingerprint is carbon isotopes.

Carbon comes in a few different flavours, most commonly carbon-12 and carbon-13.

Again, life prefers one over the other.

The ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 in living things is much higher than in non-living things.

If we see a similar pattern in the Sapphire Canyon sample, that could be another clue that its origin is biological.

You see, you and I may often think of discoveries like these in quite a binary way.

Either they're a sign of life, or they're not.

But NASA has a much more nuanced take.

They recently proposed the Confidence of Life Detection Scale, a framework for ordering how likely discoveries actually are,