Wednesday, July 29, 2026

JPL’s Chief Scientist Brings the Search for Life to a Live Audience

Caltech alumnus Jonathan Lunine will discuss the Perseverance rover’s biosignature discovery and Europa Clipper’s voyage in a free Aug. 25 livestream

The rock that may hold the strongest evidence of ancient life on Mars was drilled from an old riverbed by a robot built in Pasadena. The scientist now leading the laboratory that built it will explain what comes next — live, from the room where mission controllers talk to spacecraft billions of miles away.

Jonathan Lunine, chief scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a professor of planetary science at Caltech, will headline a free public livestream on Tuesday, August 25, at 12:00 p.m. Billed as a fireside chat and broadcast from JPL’s Space Flight Operations Facility — the nerve center known internally as the Center of the Universe — the 75-minute conversation will trace the missions driving the search for habitable worlds beyond Earth, from a single Mars rock sample to an ocean hidden beneath the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa.

The event, titled “JPL and the Search for Life Beyond Earth,” is part of the Caltech Alumni Association’s Techer Live series. It runs from 12:00 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. Pacific time and is open to anyone who registers at alumni.caltech.edu/event/techer-live-jpl-search-for-life-beyond-earth. There is no cost.

Lunine’s conversation partner will be Sarah Al-Ahmed, host and producer of Planetary Radio, the weekly podcast of The Planetary Society, which is headquartered in Pasadena.

Much of the discussion is expected to center on a Mars rock sample called Sapphire Canyon. Collected by the Perseverance rover in July 2024 from a formation along the ancient Neretva Vallis riverbed in Jezero Crater, the sample contains mineral patterns — described by NASA scientists as “leopard spots” — and organic compounds that a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Nature in September 2025 identified as potential biosignatures, according to a JPL news release. A potential biosignature, NASA said, is a substance or structure that might have a biological origin but requires further study before a conclusion can be reached.

Whether those patterns were shaped by ancient microbes or by non-biological chemistry is a question scientists say can only be settled by returning the sample to Earth for laboratory analysis.

The program will also cover the Curiosity rover’s detection of organic molecules in Gale Crater — a line of research that has expanded with a 2026 study in Nature Communications reporting more than 20 organic compounds in approximately 3.5-billion-year-old clay-bearing rock — and the Europa Clipper mission. Europa Clipper launched from Kennedy Space Center on October 14, 2024, and is now on its way to Jupiter, where it is scheduled to arrive in April 2030 to conduct 49 close flybys of Europa, an ice-covered moon believed to harbor a saltwater ocean beneath its surface, according to JPL.

Lunine is a co-investigator on Europa Clipper’s Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa instrument and a member of the mission’s gravity science team, according to his Caltech faculty profile. He was previously an interdisciplinary scientist on the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and a co-investigator on the Juno mission at Jupiter.

A Caltech alumnus who earned his master’s degree in 1983 and his doctorate in 1985, Lunine came to JPL in August 2024 after 13 years at Cornell University, where he held the David C. Duncan Professorship in the Physical Sciences and chaired the astronomy department, according to a June 2024 NASA announcement. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Al-Ahmed, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in astrophysics, became Planetary Radio’s host in January 2023 after six years at Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, according to The Planetary Society’s website. She covered the Sapphire Canyon announcement on the program last fall.

Lunine will share mission imagery and video throughout the event, according to the Caltech Alumni Association event listing, and the conversation will close with live questions from the audience.

Registration is available at alumni.caltech.edu. For questions, contact James Knutila at info@alumni.caltech.edu or 626-395-6592. The event is organized by the Caltech Alumni Association, located at 1200 East California Boulevard in Pasadena.

JPL, managed by Caltech for NASA since 1958, built the Perseverance rover that drilled Sapphire Canyon and the Europa Clipper spacecraft now flying toward Jupiter’s ocean moon. On August 25, the person steering the lab’s scientific direction will be in mission control, talking about what all of it might mean — and anyone with an internet connection can listen.

“JPL and the Search for Life Beyond Earth” takes place on Tuesday, August 25, 2026, from 12:00 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. Pacific time. Admission is free. The event is an online livestream broadcast from JPL Mission Control and requires no in-person attendance; parking is not applicable. For more information, call 626-395-6592 or visit alumni.caltech.edu/event/techer-live-jpl-search-for-life-beyond-earth.