2026 Mars Perseverance Rover (Photo – kiss.caltech.edu)
We Might All Wonder About Life on Other Planets. It’s JPL Chief Scientist Jonathan Lunine’s Job.
By Melanie Hooks
In September 2025, a sample named Sapphire Canyon made headlines around the world. Drilled by the Perseverance rover from an ancient riverbed in Mars’s Jezero Crater, the sample carries the strongest potential sign of ancient life yet found on another planet. Whether its “leopard spot” mineral patterns were made by microbes or by ordinary chemistry is a question only a returned sample can settle. But the search has never been closer to an answer.
That search runs through JPL. And Jonathan Lunine (MS ’83, PhD ’85) has dedicated his career to it.
Lunine earned both of his graduate degrees at Caltech before helping shape mission after mission across the solar system, including Cassini at Saturn, Juno at Jupiter, and Europa Clipper. He is a co-investigator on Europa Clipper, the spacecraft now traveling toward one of the most promising places to look for life beyond Earth. In 2024, he returned to Caltech as a professor of planetary science and became chief scientist at JPL.
Lunine will join Sarah Al-Ahmed, host of The Planetary Society’s Planetary Radio, for a fireside chat broadcast live from Caltech. Over 75 minutes, the two will discuss the missions defining the search for habitable worlds, including Perseverance and the Sapphire Canyon sample, Curiosity’s discovery of organic molecules in Gale Crater, and Europa Clipper’s voyage to Jupiter’s ocean moon.
Lunine will share mission imagery and video throughout the conversation, which will conclude with live questions from the audience.
Register here for the Zoom livestream. Registration is limited to 1,000 residents.
For more information, contact James Knutila at (626) 395-6592 or info@alumni.caltech.edu.
JPL and the Search for Life Beyond Earth Tuesday, August 25, 2026 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm Location Livestreamed on Zoom Register here.
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