On Wednesday (Sept. 10), NASA officials will share details about a new finding connected to a unique sample the Perseverance rover found on Mars.
The teleconference will stream on the agency’s website at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) and is expected to include some “visuals” during the discussion. You’ll also be able to tune in right here on Space.com, as our homepage will carry the stream as well.
An official press release about the conference fosters some suspense, only offering a sparse explanation about the discovery. What it does say, however, is that Perseverance collected the rock at hand in July of 2024 from Jezero Crater — a location on Mars the rover has been exploring since February 2021 and which NASA believes could have once hosted life as we know it.
More specifically, the release says the rock is named “Sapphire Canyon” and comes from a place called “Neretva Vallis,” which it explains as a “river valley carved by water rushing into Jezero Crater long ago.”
And we do know some things about Sapphire Canyon in general.
For instance, NASA has previously described it as an arrowhead-shaped rock that was extracted from another “vein-filled rock” named “Cheyava Falls.” Cheyava Falls is iconic for its “poppy seeds” and “leopard spots,” patterns the Perseverance team noticed adorning the specimen when first observing it.
But Cheyava Falls is most well-known for something else. In a video about Sapphire Canyon, posted by NASA on April 10, 2025, Morgan Cable, a research scientist for Perseverance, says Cheyava Falls 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.”
It is also of note that Sapphire Canyon is one of many samples the Perseverance team has been collecting with the hopes of bringing pieces of the Red Planet back to Earth one day. It’s the 25th sample, to be exact. That sample-retrieval process was originally meant to be achieved with NASA’s Mars Sample Return program — but due to budget constraints, a rather complex launch blueprint and priority shifts since the Trump administration took office, the fate of MSR hangs in doubt.
It is yet to be known whether the particular sample NASA will be talking about tomorrow will call for Earth-based analysis to follow, but based on the opinions of scientists who support MSR, it would be unsurprising if that turns out to be the case.
“I would describe the Sapphire Canyon sample as mysterious,” Cable says in that April 10 video. “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.”
According to the agency’s release, a paper will be eventually be released to detail the finding; tomorrow’s conference will be attended by the following agency officials:
- Sean Duffy, NASA’s acting administrator
- Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington
- Lindsay Hays, Senior Scientist for Mars Exploration, Planetary Science Division, NASA Headquarters
- Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance Project Scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California
- Joel Hurowitz, planetary scientist, Stony Brook University, New York
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