We’ve long looked up at the stars and wondered if we were alone or if there is someone else out there in the vast expanses of space. NASA just brought us one step closer to finding a definitive answer to that question. The agency announced that the 25th rock sample collected by the Perseverance rover might contain the best evidence of past life ever discovered on Mars.

But don’t go gathering your extraterrestrial welcome wagon just yet.

Unearthed (un-Marsed?) from a river-carved rock formation called Cheyava Falls, the sample, nicknamed Sapphire Canyon, looks like…a rock. It also features mysterious black “poppy seed” dots and blotchy “leopard spots” that immediately caught the eye of researchers.

According to Joel Hurowitz, planetary scientist and lead author of the Nature study on the

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