Christian Elliott

Katie's expertise.

Over the next few months, using rock samples and photographs, the science team was able to piece together exactly what had happened in this Martian river valley some two billion years ago.

Right around this time, Perseverance made its biggest discovery yet.

The science team had driven the rover up into the channel that once fed water into the crater, a place called Nuretva Valles.

I am glad I'm forgiven because I was certainly not familiar with Vivianite.

It's an iron phosphate mineral.

It can form when you have iron from rocks combined with water and organic compounds.

That's cool, but the headline here...

I cannot give you a solid answer to that, Jacob.

But I will say they found these poppy seeds.

Then they drove a bit further where they found these even bigger features that they named leopard spots.

These are also rings of iron phosphate, and they can form through chemical reactions

Yeah, as you pointed out, NASA scientists are very careful when they talk about this stuff.

They're not prone to hyperbole.

So Katie's saying that this is the first time we've had life as a solid hypothesis to explain a feature on a rock.

That is huge.

And I should note this discovery is one that only Perseverance could have made.

With those new instruments that let the rover preserve the patterns in the rock instead of just drilling and grinding it up.

But to really nail down whether these spots are a biosignature, Perseverance's rock sample vials are going to have to make it back to a lab on Earth somehow.

That'll have to wait for a future sample return mission.