NASA's Perseverance rover has found an arrowhead-shaped rock that may hold evidence of life on Mars billions of years ago.
The roughly 1-metre-long rock was discovered in the Jezero Crater on Mars, NASA said.
The discovery was made as the Perseverance rover travelled along the northern edge of an ancient river valley.
The rock is the “most complex, interesting and potentially significant” ever discovered on the Red Planet, said project scientist Ken Farley, who is leading the research.
It showed “distinctive coloured spots that indicate chemical reactions that microbial life could use as an energy source, and clear evidence that water, essential for life, once passed through the rock,” he said.
NASA plans to return a sample of the rock to Earth to further investigate how it formed and whether these chemical signatures are indeed the result of past biological activity.
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