--- title: Life on Mars? Maybe | TIME description: When the Perseverance rover landed in Mars’s Jezero crater—a formation that long ago was Jezero lake—in February, 2021 it turned west. West is where the riverbeds, the deltas, the sites of ancient gushing water once were. In July, 2024, after covering 18 miles in nearly three and a half years, it arrived at a quarter-mile-wide river valley that is home to a 3.2-ft.-long rock NASA scientists have dubbed Cheyava Falls—and there it hit paydirt. As a new paper in Nature reports, a sample Perseverance drilled from the rock may contain potential biosignatures of long ago microbial life. canonical: https://time.com/video/3cCRL532/ og:title: Life on Mars? Maybe og:description: When the Perseverance rover landed in Mars’s Jezero crater—a formation that long ago was Jezero lake—in February, 2021 it turned west. West is where the riverbeds, the deltas, the sites of ancient gushing water once were. In July, 2024, after covering 18 miles in nearly three and a half years, it arrived at a quarter-mile-wide river valley that is home to a 3.2-ft.-long rock NASA scientists have dubbed Cheyava Falls—and there it hit paydirt. As a new paper in Nature reports, a sample Perseverance drilled from the rock may contain potential biosignatures of long ago microbial life. og:url: https://time.com/video/3cCRL532/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/3cCRL532/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Life on Mars? Maybe twitter:description: When the Perseverance rover landed in Mars’s Jezero crater—a formation that long ago was Jezero lake—in February, 2021 it turned west. West is where the riverbeds, the deltas, the sites of ancient gushing water once were. In July, 2024, after covering 18 miles in nearly three and a half years, it arrived at a quarter-mile-wide river valley that is home to a 3.2-ft.-long rock NASA scientists have dubbed Cheyava Falls—and there it hit paydirt. As a new paper in Nature reports, a sample Perseverance drilled from the rock may contain potential biosignatures of long ago microbial life. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/3cCRL532/poster.jpg?width=720 --- * Science # Life on Mars? Maybe > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. A TIME subscription provides full access to that journalism in print and digital, from $20 a year, and can be cancelled at any time. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Life on Mars? Maybe [Watch (HLS stream): Life on Mars? Maybe](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/3cCRL532.m3u8) (5:38)  _Published 2025-09-16. When the Perseverance rover landed in Mars’s Jezero crater—a formation that long ago was Jezero lake—in February, 2021 it turned west. West is where the riverbeds, the deltas, the sites of ancient gushing water once were. In July, 2024, after covering 18 miles in nearly three and a half years, it arrived at a quarter-mile-wide river valley that is home to a 3.2-ft.-long rock NASA scientists have dubbed Cheyava Falls—and there it hit paydirt. As a new paper in Nature reports, a sample Perseverance drilled from the rock may contain potential biosignatures of long ago microbial life._ --- Sep 16, 2025 9:20 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [NASA Discovery Is the "Closest We Have Ever Come to Discovering Life on Mars"](/video/ScVZuRfD/) ### NASA Discovery Is the "Closest We Have Ever Come to Discovering Life on Mars" [NASA's Perseverance Rover Successfully Lands on Mars](/video/vfU7oIIi/) ### NASA's Perseverance Rover Successfully Lands on Mars [New Sign That Mars May Have Supported Life](/video/VbfrsOIN/) ### New Sign That Mars May Have Supported Life --- ## Transcript If we find life on Mars, it means that life is not unique. You know, we're a great species. We're a powerful species. We're a fractious species. We're also a lonely species. You know, as soon as we began to look at the stars, we began wondering if they could host life, if there was company for us. I think the idea of a martian comes from almost from a place of spirituality. At the moment, we have a giant universe, and ours is the only planet with its porch light on. The hope is that we find other people. Other beings are at home on other worlds. I have been covering space since, boy, since the early 1980s. Um, as soon as I got into journalism, I got into science journalism. And as soon as I got into science journalism, uh, I focused whenever I could on space stories. For me, this was a very big deal. It is the rover doing exactly what it was sent to Mars to do, which is to look for breakthrough clues to the origins and the evolution of that planet. It and it did exactly what it's intended to do. It found tantalizing signs that Mars once hosted life. This very well could be the clearest sign of life that we've ever found on Mars. What we're looking at here are sort of fingerprints of microbes. They look like poppy seeds, and they look like leopard spots. Um, and both of those are consistent with microbes leaving chemical traces behind. We see it on Earth in a lot of watery environments, these poppy seeds and leopard spots, and they're sort of like, we exhale and we produce carbon dioxide. These we perspire and we leave salty water behind. These microbes leave these two minerals behind when they've been there. You can sort of see their fingerprints. If the numbers change when the eighth line comes in, they will represent at least the beginnings of a picture image. A preliminary analysis of the state of. Congratulations to you both. As a matter of fact. NASA has been looking at Mars since the early 60s when we first flew the Mariner spacecraft by Mars and got the first American close up pictures on Mars. We first landed on Mars in 1976 with the Viking one and Viking two landers, and even then, those landers were equipped with an experiment to be able to look for, uh, byproducts of life. They didn't find it. They found some tantalizing clues, but they didn't find anything convincing. That's one of the reasons we started sending rovers, uh, in 1997, because the Vikings were stuck with landing in one place. So if you land in a desert and you scoop up the soil, and that's the only place you've explored on an entire planet, your sample area is pretty limited. These rovers are able to travel from site to site. Touchdown confirmed. Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars. Ready to begin. Seeking the signs of past life. The perseverance rover landed on Mars in February of 2021. It is the fifth rover uh, NASA has launched to Mars. It's covered 18 miles in a formation called the Jezero Crater, which was once the Jezero Lake. The Mars sample return mission is something that people have been talking about in NASA since the 1970s, and it involves landing on the surface, scooping up samples, taking off and flying back home, and bringing scientists small pieces of Mars. We have never been able to get this mission off the ground because it's punishingly expensive and very complicated. The current Mars sample return mission would involve perseverance leaving samples on the surface, another rover flying up to Mars and collecting the samples, a piece of that rover taking off of Mars and linking up with an orbiter and then coming home. So you have at least three missions, three spacecraft. It's going to be a long time before it happens, but the hope is there that it will happen. 210. And liftoff as the countdown to Mars continues. The perseverance of humanity launching the next generation of robotic explorers to the Red planet. In early May, the president proposed cutting 24% out of NASA's budget, and among the projects that were set to be eliminated is the Mars Sample return mission. Now, NASA still has hope because under the Constitution, it's the House and the Senate that allocate funding. And NASA has a lot of friends in Congress, especially from big, powerful space states like Florida and Texas and California. So the betting is those cuts will not go through if we find life on another world without even having to leave our own solar system. It means life is extremely common. One Exobiologist I talked to said the formula is one, two, or infinity. If you can find life on one world, you don't know if that's a knockoff, if it's a one off, if you find it on two worlds, there's no reason it couldn't be on 22 and 52 and 2.2 trillion. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Life on Mars? Maybe","description":"When the Perseverance rover landed in Mars’s Jezero crater—a formation that long ago was Jezero lake—in February, 2021 it turned west. West is where the riverbeds, the deltas, the sites of ancient gushing water once were. 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