Only a little over a week after scientists announced NASA’s Perseverance rover may have detected a potential biosignature in a Martian rock named Sapphire Canyon, a new study suggests similar habitable conditions were widespread across Jezero Crater — the site of that major discovery — broadening the stage for the search for ancient life on Mars.
In the study, scientists identified 24 minerals that chart Jezero’s changing environment, highlighting both the volcanic origins of rocks in the crater and a long history of their interaction with water. Although the research does not analyze the Sapphire Canyon sample directly, it shows the crater as a whole experienced multiple episodes of water activity, each with conditions that could have supported life (as we know it).
“There were several times in Mars’ history when these particular volcanic rocks interacted with liquid water,” study lead author Eleanor Moreland of Rice University in Texas said in a statement, “and therefore more than one time when this location hosted environments potentially suitable for life.”
The study draws on three years of data collected by Perseverance, which has been exploring Jezero since landing on Mars in 2021. Using the rover’s X-ray instrument (PIXL) and a newly developed algorithm called MIST, researchers were able to identify the minerals and assemble a so-called “mineralogical archive” of the crater, according to the statement.
Minerals are natural storytellers, forming under specific combinations of temperature, chemistry and pH. At Jezero, they reveal three stages of water-rock interaction, each with different implications for habitability, the new study notes. To ensure accuracy, the team ran their identifications through thousands of statistical simulations — a process likened to how meteorologists model hurricane tracks — to account for instrument error and assign confidence levels to each match, according to the statement.
The oldest rocks on the crater floor bore signs of hot, acidic fluids, recorded in minerals such as greenalite, hisingerite and ferroaluminoceladonite. These conditions would have been least favorable for life, scientists say, as high temperatures and low pH are known to damage biological structures.
“These hot, acidic conditions would be the most challenging for life,” study co-author Kirsten Siebach, who is an assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Rice University, said in the statement. “But on Earth, life can persist even in extreme environments like the acidic pools of water at Yellowstone, so it doesn’t rule out habitability.”
Later episodes of water activity left behind minerals such as minnesotaite and clinoptilolite, which formed in cooler, more neutral waters that would have been friendlier to microbes, the study reports.
Finally, researchers found widespread deposits of sepiolite, a mineral that forms in low-temperature, alkaline waters considered highly hospitable from an Earth perspective. Its presence across all regions Perseverance has explored suggests a broad episode of habitable conditions, scientists say.
“These minerals tell us that Jezero experienced a shift from harsher, hot, acidic fluids to more neutral and alkaline ones over time — conditions we think of as increasingly supportive of life,” Moreland said in the statement.
Alongside these alteration minerals, the team also confirmed the presence of volcanic building blocks such as pyroxene, feldspar and olivine, reinforcing the prevailing view that Jezero’s floor was formed by ancient lava flows later transformed by water.
The new findings also add context to last year’s headlines, when Perseverance’s work at Cheyava Falls — where Sapphire Canyon was sampled — revealed intriguing signs of conditions often linked to microbial life. At the time, scientists described it as the strongest evidence yet that Mars may once have hosted primitive organisms, though they stressed that nonbiological explanations, such as certain mineral reactions from heating, could not be ruled out.
Follow-up analyses have since found no evidence the rock was heated, but researchers caution that only laboratory studies on Earth can settle the biological-versus-nonbiological debate.
“We’re pretty close to the limits of what the rover can do on the surface,” Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance Project Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said during a press conference last week on Sept. 10. “That was by design. The payload of the Perseverance rover was selected with a Mars sample return effort in mind; the idea was for our payload to get us just up to the potential biosignature designation and have the rest of the story told by instruments here on Earth.”
Each tube cached on Mars could hold a crucial piece of the puzzle — and perhaps, the first direct evidence of life beyond Earth. But the path to bringing them home continues to remain uncertain. After years of cost overruns, NASA announced in January that it would study cheaper alternatives for its proposed Mars Sample Return (MSR) program, which would aim to deliver samples by 2035. The agency’s 2026 budget proposal, however, calls for canceling the program.
“We believe there is a better way to do this, a faster way to get these samples back,” Sean Duffy, NASA’s acting administrator, said during the press conference last week, , though he offered no details on cost, timing, or technical approach.
Meanwhile, China is pushing ahead with its own Mars sample-return mission. The Tianwen-3 mission aims to collect at least 500 grams of Martian rock and soil as early as 2028 and return them to Earth by 2031 — potentially beating NASA to the milestone. If successful, China would secure the first Mars samples and perform a dramatic leap in planetary science leadership.
In addition to revealing Mars’ mineral story, the new MIST algorithm developed by the study authors could prove critical in deciding which rocks to return to Earth, the new study notes. By identifying minerals and assigning confidence levels to each detection, it helps mission scientists prioritize the most valuable samples. Such a catalog, tied to specific sampling sites, would be vital when selecting which sealed cores to bring back under the MSR program.
“The results reported here can be crucial when down-selecting which samples, if not all, are returned to Earth,” the researchers wrote in the study.
The study was published on Sept. 11 in the Journal of Geophysical Research.