Follow the salt to find Martian life

摘要

Never mind water. Martian life might be buried deep in salt. Billions of years ago, the Red Planet hosted rivers, lakes and seas - suggesting microbial life could have thrived in the past. "Most of my fellow scientists feel confident that there's a very high chance that life existed at some point on Mars," says Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University. "So the question is only, with conditions worsening to colder and drier, whether life could have hung in." Schulze-Makuch and his colleague Alfonso Davila of the SETI Institute in California, investigated how microbes adapt to dryness here on Earth. Previous research in Chile's Atacama desert (pictured) - a close Earthly analogue to Mars - has shown that many organisms can survive for years after drying out, reactivating quickly after rehydration.