"The surface of Mars is a very oxidizing, radiation-heavy environment where liquid water is not really stable for an extended amount of time," Stamenković said. Vlada Stamenković, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, backed the underground approach at the conference. While the cold, dry surface of Mars, with its harsh radiation environment, is widely considered to be uninhabitable, the subsurface has been hypothesized to be a viable, long-lived habitable environment, protected from the punishing surface conditions of Mars and a place where water could be stable. The dots indicate the location of possible caves in the Tharsis region on Mars. Geological Survey's (USGS) Astrogeology Science Center has released the locations of more than 1,000 cave-entrance candidates on Mars. Geological environmentsĬonference attendees generally agreed that the best places to look for extant Mars life are in the deep subsurface caves, and in salt and ice. Such systems include a complex and pricey Mars sample-return effort that officially kicks off this summer with the launch of NASA's Mars 2020 rover. On the meeting agenda was a discussion of how best to test for extant life on Mars, with or without the benefit of collection systems. Related: The search for life on Mars (a photo timeline)Īstrobiologists and other experts tackled some of these issues last November during a conference at the National Cave and Karst Research Institute in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
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