Techer Live: JPL and the Search for Life Beyond Earth

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: Cassini at Saturn, Juno at Jupiter, and Europa Clipper, where he is a co-investigator on the spacecraft now flying toward one of the most promising places to look for life beyond Earth. In 2024 he returned to Caltech as professor of planetary science and became chief scientist at JPL.

Join Lunine for a fireside chat with Sarah Al-Ahmed, host of The Planetary Society’s Planetary Radio, broadcast live from Caltech. Over 75 minutes, the two will walk through the missions defining the hunt for habitable worlds: Perseverance and the Sapphire Canyon sample, Curiosity’s organic molecules in Gale Crater, and Europa Clipper’s voyage to Jupiter’s ocean moon. Lunine will share mission imagery and video throughout, and the conversation closes with live questions from the audience.

Learn more at https://www.alumni.caltech.edu/event/techer-live-jpl-search-for-life-beyond-earth/

About the Series:


Techer Live is a new series presented by the Caltech Alumni Association, designed to bring timely, thought-provoking conversations to alumni worldwide—primarily online, with select in-person events.

Learn more at https://www.alumni.caltech.edu/techer-live

Produced in association with Caltech Academic Media Technologies.

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