Meet the Mars Samples: Sapphire Canyon (Sample 25)
Meet the 25th Martian sample collected by NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover – “Sapphire Canyon” – a sample taken from a vein-filled rock named “Cheyava Falls.” The arrowhead-shaped rock contains compelling features that may help answer whether Mars was home to microscopic life in the distant past.
As of early April 2024, the Perseverance rover has collected and sealed 28 scientifically selected samples inside pristine tubes as part of the Mars Sample Return campaign. The next stage is to get them to Earth for study.
Considered one of the planetary science community’s highest priorities, MSR would be the first effort to bring back pieces of another planet and provides the best opportunity to answer fundamental questions about Mars' early evolution, its potential for ancient life, and its climate, while also unlocking mysteries that we have yet to even conceive. NASA is teaming with ESA (European Space Agency) on this important endeavor.
A key objective for Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet's geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, as well as be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).
Read about all the carefully selected samples: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/mars-rock-samples/
Learn more about the Mars Sample Return campaign: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-sample-return/
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/JHU-APL/Purdue/USGS/STScI/Maryland Astrobiology Consortium
Transcript
(Morgan Cable)
Our first reaction on the team when we saw this rock was like, Whoa, what is that? What could have caused that?
Sample 25 is called Sapphire Canyon. This is a core that was collected from the Cheyava Falls rock in the Neretva Vallis.
The Cheyava Falls rock is really neat. If you look at it, it's got all sorts of cool features. It has these small black spots that we call poppy seeds and also these larger spots that we call leopard spots. This is the only place we've found on Mars so far where we have chemical evidence that chemical reactions associated with life could have been happening as well as organic molecules.
The SHERLOC instrument detected an organic signature, so both of those together in the same rock is really compelling because these similar types of features, when we find them on earth, oftentimes they're associated with biology, with microbes. And so those pieces of evidence combined together, we believe, justify calling it a potential biosignature.
I would describe the Sapphire Canyon sample as mysterious because we see these signatures that tell us chemistry has happened, potentially involving organics. But what does that mean? Could life have been involved? Or something that didn't involve life at all? We're not going to know until we bring that sample back and do some more measurements.