It’s an age-old question. Was there ever life on Mars?

Earth just got closer to an answer — maybe.

A rover built and managed in Southern California, with a mission to understand the Red Planet has lived up to its name.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover — built and managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge — collected a rock sample that NASA leaders say offers the best signs yet that ancient Mars harbored some form of life, authorities said Wednesday.

The sample, called “Sapphire Canyon,” was collected from an ancient dry riverbed in one of the planet’s craters, showing signs of microbial life, according to a paper published Wednesday, in the journal Nature.

The biosignatures collected last year aren’t exactly household names: There’s your “millimeter-scale reaction

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