A Pasadena-built robot may have found signs of ancient life on Mars. On Tuesday, August 25, the scientist leading the lab that built it will explain what comes next, live from JPL's mission control, free to anyone who registers.
Jonathan Lunine, chief scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a professor of planetary science at Caltech, will host a 75-minute fireside chat starting at noon Pacific time, according to Altadena Now. The event, titled "JPL and the Search for Life Beyond Earth," will be broadcast from JPL's Space Flight Operations Facility, the room where controllers communicate with spacecraft billions of miles away. Registration is open at alumni.caltech.edu with no cost.
The conversation will center on a Mars rock sample called Sapphire Canyon. The Perseverance rover drilled it from an ancient riverbed in Jezero Crater in July 2024. A peer-reviewed paper published in Nature on September 10, 2025, identified mineral patterns in the sample — described by NASA scientists as "leopard spots" — and organic compounds as potential biosignatures, meaning they might have a biological origin but need further study.
Whether the patterns came from ancient microbes or non-biological chemistry can only be settled by returning the sample to Earth for lab analysis.
At a NASA press conference that same day, acting Administrator Sean Duffy said, "This very well could be the clearest sign of life that we've ever found on Mars," EarthSky reported.
Lunine will also discuss the Europa Clipper mission, a JPL-built spacecraft that launched October 14, 2024, and is scheduled to reach Jupiter in April 2030 for 49 flybys of Europa, an ice-covered moon believed to harbor a saltwater ocean. Lunine serves as a co-investigator on the mission's imaging spectrometer and a member of its gravity science team.
His conversation partner will be Sarah Al-Ahmed, host of Planetary Radio, the weekly podcast of The Planetary Society, which is also headquartered in Pasadena. Al-Ahmed covered the Sapphire Canyon announcement on the program in fall 2025.
A Caltech alumnus who earned his doctorate there in 1985, Lunine joined JPL in August 2024 after 13 years at Cornell University, where he chaired the astronomy department. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
The event is part of the Caltech Alumni Association's Techer Live series and runs from noon to 1:15 p.m. Lunine will share mission imagery and take live audience questions. For registration questions, contact James Knutila at [email protected] or 626-395-6592.
Families looking for more JPL access can also mark their calendars: Explore JPL, the lab's first public open house since 2023, is set for Saturday, October 10, and Sunday, October 11, Altadena Now reported. Free timed-entry tickets go live Saturday, August 29, at 9 a.m. at jpl.nasa.gov/explore-jpl and are expected to be claimed within 10 to 15 minutes.
