WASHINGTON — Scientists have found potential evidence of past life on Mars in a rock sample collected by a NASA rover, even as the agency’s budget proposal would cancel plans to return those samples to Earth.

At a Sept. 10 press conference, NASA officials and scientists discussed a paper published in Nature about a rock sample named Sapphire Canyon, collected by the Perseverance rover last year. The sample, taken from a larger rock called Cheyava Falls, stood out because of dark spots in the rock.

“These textural features told us that something really interesting has happened in these rocks, some set of chemical reactions occurred at the time they were being deposited,” said Joel Hurowitz, a planetary scientist at Stony Brook University and lead author of the paper.

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