"Okay, we're at the surface," a voice calls across the tent. "Can someone hit the 'yes' button?" In the centre of a makeshift laboratory, sweltering beneath the Spanish sun, people cluster anxiously around a robotic drill. Its silver arm draws up fromthe deep hole it has made in the dirt. Hitting the 'yes' button will trigger the drill to release its cargo, and reveal whether it has managed to bore material from metres beneath our feet. "Have we got a core?" asks Howard Cannon, an engineer from NASA's Ames Research Center in California. Peering into the end of the instrument, he spots a plug of red mud, some 7 centimetres long. This is good news. The drill is a prototype for an instrument that might one day be sent to Mars. It's Cannon's job to seeif he can get the drill to work here on Earth. A team of mission scientists is pretending that this drill, and the precious core it carries, is located on Mars. The drill is equipped with scientific instruments to search for signs of life in the dirt. So, for the team, extracting this chunk of red earth could be a step towards finding out whether life lurks beneath the sterile surface of Mars.
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