[Harri (OP)]

I've just read the latest exciting news involving the Perseverance Rover at the Jezero crater. What is not so exciting for me personally is that when the samples from Mars are brought to earth in the early 2030's I may well not be around! I'm old! I'm old enough to have seen man's first flights around and to the moon. And old enough to remember 'Martians'! So if I'm ever to finally discover whether there was or is life on Mars then it would have to come from another source. So other than the samples from Mars expected in the 30's is there another way of revealing life on Mars?

[Halc]

I've just read the latest exciting news involving the Perseverance Rover at the Jezero crater.

Details? All I see is that it managed to take some samples, and the chemical signatures suggest a potential habitability of the planet. They've not found the signatures of actual life, unless I'm reading the wrong articles.

And old enough to remember 'Martians'!

Marvin is still my Martian.

s is there another way of revealing life on Mars?

I doubt if a few random samples is going to reveal that. Still, there can never be a definite-no to the question. If there was brief life there, what are the odds of finding what little traces it might have left?

[Harri (OP)]

This is what I was reading Halc. 

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl4051

I know there's no mention of actual life but collecting samples and eventually getting them back to earth I found exciting. I did get to see some moon rock way back and that really was mind blowing.

Marvin? Halc, I'm talking about the real Martians 

[evan_au]

We already have some samples of Mars rocks, in the form of meteorites.
These are thought to have been blasted out of Mars by a large meteorite impact on Mars, and after wandering around the Solar System for a few million years, happened to collide with Earth.

There was an observation some years ago of cell-like structures in these meteorites, which was claimed to be evidence of past life. Even for a meteorite landing in Antarctica, it is felt that there has been contamination by chemicals from Earth. So we would like some uncontaminated samples from Mars, with known provenance (eg from a river delta in Jezero crater).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_meteorite#Possible_evidence_of_life