Hunt for life on Mars

摘要

It was only a tweet, but it takes us a step closer to finding out if there is life on Mars. On 27 April, private spaceflight company SpaceX used Twitter to announce its intention to send its Dragon capsule to the Red Planet as soon as 2018 - and it seems like it may actually happen. The timeline has been labelled ambitious, but realistic. The Red Dragon mission is step one in CEO Elon Musk's even more ambitious plan to send people to live on Mars. If Red Dragon flies, it may become the quickest way to deliver experiments to search for life on the Martian surface - or even bring a piece of Mars back to Earth. NASA is already in talks with SpaceX to send such an experiment to the planet should this mission be a success.