Category Archives: Mars

Nasa plans to launch its latest mission to Mars this month, which aims to place the Perseverance rover on the surface of the planet in February 2021.

It is the latest attempt to explore a planet that has loomed large in the popular imagination for centuries. As the planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson, author of The Sirens of Mars,tells Rachel Humphreys, there is a long history of hopes, theories and fictional representations of life on Mars. But so far none has been discovered.

The latest mission will search for habitable conditions on the planets surface and gather rocks for a future mission to bring back to Earth. It is just one of several different Mars missions to launch this month, all with one ultimate question in mind: are we alone in the universe?

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Perseverance: the new mission to Mars | News - The Guardian

On movie missions to Mars, getting there is the easy part. The Martians Mark Watney was fine until a dust storm left him fending for himself. Douglas Quaids jaunt to the Red Planet in Total Recall was smooth sailing until he came under fire at Martian customs and immigration.

But in real life, just getting to Mars and back will be rife with dangers that have nothing to do with extreme weather or armed gunmen.

The mission to Mars is likely going to be four to six individuals [living] together in a can the size of a Winnebago for three years, says Leticia Vega, associate chief scientist for the NASA Human Research Program in Houston. Time on the planet will be sandwiched between a six- to nine-month journey there plus the same long trip back.

Once outside of Earths protective gravitational and magnetic fields, microgravity and radiation become big worries. Microgravity allows fluid buildup in the head, which can cause vision problems, and adventurers cruising through interplanetary space will be continually pelted with high-energy charged particles that zip right through the metal belly of a spacecraft. Researchers dont know just how harmful that radiation is, but lab experiments suggest it could raise astronauts risk of cancer and other diseases.

The length of the mission brings its own dangers. The moon was like a camping trip when you think about going to Mars, says Erik Antonsen, an emergency medicine physician and aerospace engineer at NASAs Johnson Space Center in Houston. Setting aside the social and psychological problems that could arise among people trapped together inside an interplanetary mobile home (SN: 11/29/14, p. 22), three years offers a lot more time and opportunity to get sick or injured than a dayslong Apollo mission. And Mars is about 600 times farther from Earth than the moon is. Even light-speed communications will take about 20 minutes to reach Earth from Mars. Phoning Houston for help in an emergency is not an option.

The reality is, when we do the first missions to Mars, theres a high likelihood that somebody may die, Antonsen says. If someone goes out and they get an abrasion on their eyeball and its not responding to whatever [is] on the vehicle, theyre coming back one-eyed Jack.

Despite those dangers, the United States, Russia, China and other nations have all voiced their intentions to send people to the Red Planet. NASA is gunning for a mission to Mars in the 2030s. With that deadline in mind, researchers are developing a suite of medical devices and medications to bring on a trip to Mars.

The items on this packing list are in the very early stages of development, and in some cases, still pretty impractical and unproven. Universal diagnostic wands are a distant dream. But researchers are devising artificial-gravity suits, anti-radiation medications and miniature medical tools that scientists hope will be ready in about a decade to keep the first travelers to Mars safe and healthy.

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For something that looks so relaxing, floating in microgravity is surprisingly bad for you. When the body doesnt have to pull its own weight, muscles and bones weaken. This was a big problem in the early days of spaceflight. When the Soviet Soyuz 9 crew returned from a record 18 days in space in June 1970, one cosmonaut was so weak that he couldnt carry his own helmet when he stepped out of the landing capsule (SN: 6/27/70, p. 615). Today, astronauts on the International Space Station keep up their strength by exercising for a couple of hours each day. But other problems with life in microgravity remain unsolved.

In space, bodily fluids that Earths gravity normally keeps in the lower body drift toward the head, increasing intracranial pressure. If you were to sit down in a chair and put your head between your knees thats a bit what it feels like, says NASA astronaut Thomas Marshburn, who completed a five-month stint on the space station in 2013.

Researchers suspect that constant elevated pressure behind the eyes is to blame for vision problems, such as farsightedness, that about half of astronauts develop in space. I had a harder time reading the keys on the laptop, Marshburn recalls.

Weightlessness also confuses the gravity-sensing vestibular organs in the inner ear that play a role in balance and motor control. Upon returning to Earth, I could walk in a straight line pretty easily by the end of that day, but it took me a few days before I could start to walk around a corner without running into the wall, Marshburn says.

To make sure astronauts can walk straight and see what theyre doing on Mars, a spaceship could be outfitted with artificial-gravity machines. One such machine is a lower body negative pressure, or LBNP, chamber. The device applies vacuum pressure to the lower half of the body while a person is sealed in from the waist down. The vacuum re-creates the downward pull of gravity, planting the persons feet firmly on the floor of the chamber and drawing bodily fluids toward the legs.

In one experiment, 10 volunteers who already had medical devices implanted to measure intracranial pressure sealed their lower bodies inside an LBNP chamber. Participants had to lie down for the experiment to bring their intracranial pressure closer to what it would be like in space. When someone on Earth goes from standing to lying down, their intracranial pressure rises from around 0 millimeters of mercury to about 15 mmHg closer to what astronauts are thought to experience in space. As the researchers slowly increased the devices vacuum pressure, participants average intracranial pressure dropped from 15 to 9.4 mmHg, the researchers reported in 2019 in the Journal of Physiology.

We really dont know right now how much time [in LBNP] we need to protect the body from the harmful effects of fluid shifts in space, says Alan Hargens, a space physiologist at the University of California, San Diego. But in case LBNP becomes a significant part of the day, Hargens team built a prototype LBNP suit that can be worn during daily activity. The suit consists of a pair of overalls with built-in shoes and a seal around the waist. Vacuum pressure pulls the wearer down onto the shoe soles. These lower body negative pressure devices are an early form of artificial gravity, Hargens says. Such devices may be easier to send into space than alternatives being tested, such as centrifuges.

A centrifuge simulates gravity through centrifugal force the effect that keeps water in the bottom of a bucket when you swing it over your head. A centrifuge designed to help astronauts in microgravity looks sort of like a carousel, but with beds instead of ponies. The rider lies on a bed, head pointing toward the center of the carousel, which spins to exert a horizontal centrifugal force out toward the feet thats as strong as the downward pull of gravity. A room-sized centrifuge would be a lot harder to launch in a spaceship than an LBNP suit. But some researchers think the whole-body-centrifuge experience may combat microgravity issues that LBNP doesnt, such as the inner ear problems.

To investigate the effects of a centrifuge on sensorimotor control, Rachael Seidler, a motor control researcher at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and colleagues kept 24 volunteers in bed for 60 days to mimic life in microgravity. Sixteen of the participants spun in a centrifuge for a total of 30 minutes each day, while the other eight got no centrifugation. Before and after bed rest, participants were tested on their balance and were put through an obstacle course. Weve just had a very preliminary peek at the data, Seidler says, but it does look like the artificial gravity was helpful for motor control.

Life in microgravity may be a problem for a Mars crew, but at least its a familiar challenge to astronauts. Chronic exposure to deep space radiation, on the other hand, is a hazard that no space traveler has faced before.

The solar system is awash in charged particles called galactic cosmic rays that travel at nearly the speed of light. These particles tear through metal like its tissue paper and can kill cells or create mutations in the DNA within. Astronauts on the space station, like folks on Earth, are largely protected from these tiny wrecking balls by Earths magnetic field. But a Mars-bound crew will be totally exposed. En route to the Red Planet, astronauts are expected to receive almost two millisieverts of radiation daily roughly equal to getting a full-body CT scan every six days.

The only people ever fully immersed in deep space radiation were those who went to the moon, but they were exposed for less than two weeks. On a Mars mission, we really dont know exactly whats going to happen to humans when they get these types of exposures, says Emmanuel Urquieta, a space medicine researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. But judging by lab animal and cell experiments, this radiation wont be giving astronauts any superpowers.

In tests on animals and in human tissue, beams of particles designed to mimic space radiation degrade heart and blood vessel tissue, suggesting a Mars crew may be at higher risk for cardiovascular diseases, according to a 2018 report in Nature Reviews Cardiology. Similarly, observations of rodents exposed to radiation suggest that space radiation impairs cognitive function, researchers reported in a review article in the May 2019 Life Sciences in Space Research.

Theres also a good amount of data on radiations ability to induce cancer in the lungs, liver and brain, says Peter Guida, a researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., who studies the biological effects of radiation.

Scary radiation effects seen in lab animals or cell cultures should be taken with a grain of salt. A mouse is not a person, and brain cells in a dish do not make a brain. Also, animals and cells typically get the entire Mars missionlevel dose of radiation in a single session or in a series of radiation exposures over weeks or months, which is not the same thing as getting constant, low-level exposure. But the warning signs from these experiments are worrying enough that researchers are testing various anti-radiation medications.

The biggest and most promising field for countermeasure development is antioxidants, Guida says. High-energy charged particles can cause damage by splintering water molecules in the body into toxic compounds called reactive oxygen species. Priming the body with antioxidants could help neutralize some of those reactive oxygen species and curb their effects. Options include vitamins A and E, as well as selenomethionine, an ingredient found in some dietary supplements. All these have shown at various levels to decrease the negative effects of radiation, he says.

Even harnessing the natural antioxidant powers of berries might help. In one experiment, rats fed food laced with freeze-dried blueberry powder for four weeks seemed to perform slightly better on a memory test after exposure to high-energy charged particles than rats fed normal chow before exposure. In the test, the rats were shown two objects: one they had seen before radiation exposure and one they had not. Blueberry-fed rats spent almost 70 percent of their time exploring the new object, as expected of animals that recognized the old object. But the other rats spent about half their time exploring each object, suggesting that theyd forgotten the object theyd seen before, researchers reported in 2017 in Life Sciences in Space Research.

Antioxidants, on their own, may not be enough protection, says Marjan Boerma, a radiation biologist at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. Boerma and colleagues are testing whether aspirin and other anti-inflammatories, including a form of vitamin E called gamma-tocotrienol, can help reduce cell damage from high-energy particles. It may take a medley of pharmaceuticals or perhaps a carefully blended smoothie. Scientists are still far from hammering out the exact ingredients of that anti-radiation regimen, she says.

Pulling shifts in artificial gravity and swallowing antioxidants may become part of an astronauts daily routine. But Mars visitors will also have to deal with any unexpected illnesses and injuries without mission control to talk them through an emergency.

A Mars crew may include a physician. But that person could also get sick, Urquieta says, and that physician is not going to be board-certified in 10 different specialties. Ideally, the Mars spaceship would be equipped with artificial intelligence that could consider an astronauts symptoms, recommend medical tests, make diagnoses and assign treatments. But a reliable Dr. AI is nowhere close to reality.

Right now, the most sophisticated symptom checkers are tools like VisualDx, diagnostic software used by health care workers in hospitals and clinics. The user answers questions about a patient, such as symptoms and demographic features, to winnow down possible diagnoses. For skin conditions, VisualDx can also analyze photos of a patients skin; its now being expanded to help users assess ultrasound scans.

Art Papier, a dermatologist and chief executive officer at VisualDx, and colleagues designed a version of the system for use in deep space that works on a laptop without internet. The software doesnt have to account for every possible diagnosis, like infectious diseases from the tropics. Instead, the focus is on medical conditions that astronauts have a fairly high chance of developing, like rashes or kidney stones.

To help walk astronauts through first aid and medical exams, spaceflight physiologist and space medicine scientist Douglas Ebert of KBR, Inc. in Houston and colleagues are developing a tool called the Autonomous Medical Officer Support, or AMOS, system. An early version of the software uses pictures and videos to teach novices how to perform an eye exam, for example, or insert a breathing tube.

The researchers tested an AMOS prototype with about 30 nonphysicians, who learned how to perform several medical procedures. Those people came back three to nine months later to do the procedures again, using the software for guidance as necessary, to mimic how an astronaut would use AMOS for preflight training and in-the-moment support during an emergency.

Around 80 percent of participants accurately performed eye exams and ultrasounds and about 70 percent correctly inserted an IV. When it came to a tougher task inserting a breathing tube just about half pulled it off, Ebert and colleagues reported in January in Galveston, Texas, at the NASA Human Research Program Investigators Workshop. In April, astronauts on board the space station successfully used the software to perform kidney and bladder ultrasound scans without help from ground control.

When performing medical exams, astronauts wont have the starship Enterprises sick bay at their disposal. Theyll need miniature medical devices that fit on the spacecraft.

For medical imaging, space medicine researchers have their eyes on a new ultrasound device called the Butterfly iQ that replaces the variety of transducers usually needed to image different body parts with a single probe the size of an electric razor. Standard ultrasound machinery is around 15 times heavier than the Butterfly iQ, which displays images on a mobile app.

The company 1Drop Diagnostics, which is developing credit cardsized chips to detect chemical markers of different diseases in blood samples from a finger prick, is working on portable blood tests for astronauts.

The medical kit that astronauts use to patch each other up will have to be lightweight and compact. To decide what goes in a spaceship first aid kit, researchers use NASAs Integrated Medical Model, which forecasts which health problems the astronauts on a particular mission are most likely to have.

Researchers plug in mission details, like where the crew is headed and astronauts genders and preexisting conditions. The model then runs thousands of mission simulations to gauge the risks of that specific crew having anything from constipation to a heart attack so that planners can prioritize medical kit supplies.

Ebert and colleagues have already used this system to build a preliminary first aid packing list for a crewed lunar flyby mission that NASA has planned for 2022. For this three-week trip, the first aid kit is pretty simple: medication for back pain, motion sickness and the like.

Packing for Mars is going to be a whole new ball game, Ebert says. But researchers still have at least a decade to shrink their equipment down to size and figure out what mix of medical supplies will give Mars astronauts the best chance of surviving their epic voyage.

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What will astronauts need to survive the dangerous journey to Mars? - Science News

When Jan Woerner took over the director generals chair at the European Space Agency (ESA) in late 2015, he quickly took some flack for talking about a Moon village. The term perhaps unfortunately called up images of cafes and a church, and at the time Woerner even said he had had to field questions about who might be the lord mayor.

But Woerner, who is nothing if not careful with words, also stressed that village was chosen very specifically to suggest a place where people come together with ideas, a single place but with multiple uses and multiple users. He was looking beyond the International Space Station - at that time coming to the end of its planned service life, with partner nations still discussing an extension - and his notion of a permanent human presence on the Moon was to be a focal point for any spacefaring nation, or perhaps private venture, to participate in large or small ways in the next great international collaborative project.

The idea never translated into missions, hardware or budgets and NASA, at least publicly, barely acknowledged a key allys vision. At that time, ESAs US counterpart ritually batted away talk of the Moon as a distraction from the Barack Obama White Houses instruction to aim for Mars in the 2030s. None of the big budget ESA members embraced the Moon.

Five years later, however, the Moon is on everybodys space radar following President Donald Trumps decision to turn NASAs attention to returning US boots to the Moon. Woerner is too diplomatic to suggest he feels vindicated, but in an online FIA Connect conference session titled Why Mars: the out-of-this-world benefits of space exploration, he readily admitted to being happy that the USA is talking about a city on the Moon, and that even Elon Musk has spoken of having a Moon base Alpha.

As Woerner observes: The vision of the Moon village is gone. Its reality now. Indeed, he adds, NASAs conceptual architecture of a Gateway space station in cis-lunar space - as a jumping-off point for the surface and to host international research teams - is exactly the Moon village concept.

If remarks by other participants in the FIA webinar are any indication, there is palpable enthusiasm for missions to the Moon. Andrew Stanniland, chief executive of Thales Alenia Space UK, notes that the Apollo missions 50 years ago left lots of unfinished business on the Moon, where there remains a strong argument for technology development. And, he adds, going to and operating on the Moon is hard, and some of industry has forgotten that, some never learned.

Will Whitehorn, the former president of Virgin Galactic who now heads British trade association UKspace, agrees that the Moon is hard, and contends that as a private, public, international venture it is a glorious opportunity to learn what needs to be done to go to Mars and beyond.

UK Space Agency head Graham Turnock stresses that work on the Moon is needed to learn how to operate in deep space, for extended stays away from Earth. For example, he underscores the need to learn how to protect people from radiation, and to crack water into the hydrogen - and oxygen - that will be needed for any sustainable life-support system.

Woerner adds that the Moon remains scientifically very interesting; there is water and minerals, and an observatory on the far side could provide unparalleled views of the Universe. However, he is clear that he is not against going back to the Moon: I am strongly against it because we should not copy what was done 50 years ago, in a race in space. This time, we should go there together, on an international and also a commercial and public basis.

Therefore I always say, lets not go back to the Moon, as the Americans are saying. Lets go forward to the Moon.

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Why mastering the Moon is vital before missions to Mars - Flightglobal

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The United Arab Emirates' Hope mission, scheduled to launch to the Red Planet July 16, 2020 will conduct a detailed examination of the Martian atmosphere.

Also known as the Emirates Mars Mission, Hope is an orbiter designed to spend one Martian year (two Earth years) looking at the Red Planet's atmosphere, studying how it eroded over time until Mars no longer was able to host liquid water on the surface.

Click through this Space.com gallery to learn about why the Arab country embarked on such a bold mission, and what this will mean for the country's science, engineering and education communities.

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Mars 'Hope': UAE's 1st interplanetary probe will make historyThe boldest Mars missions of all time

Technicians are shown here working on the Hope mission at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai.

Going to Mars was meant to spur the nation's technology industry to great heights, and also to create a planetary science community in a region where there was practically none before the mission.

This is the first time any Arab nation has attempted a Red Planet mission, and the development happened quickly as UAE leaders first considered a Mars orbiter in 2014.

The UAE has decided to ramp up its own spacecraft-building technologies such as building Hope's "bus," or main structural component seen in this picture to diversify the nation's industries.

The nation is largely built on oil revenue and is looking to create other streams of income on top of this one, and it hopes that the Mars mission would help spur technological development in other sectors, such as electronics.

The nearly complete Hope Mars orbiter undergoes checks during the final launch preparations on June 6, 2020.

The team brought on international partners to help get the spacecraft ready efficiently, including the University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

The partnership benefitted from the university's expertise on the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, which is also studying the Martian atmosphere with different science questions.

Some spacecraft engineers pose before the Hope orbiter on Feb. 18, 2020.The UAE built the spacecraft domestically, while asking for international expertise to meet their goal of performing new science at Mars with their very first mission.

Personnel quickly embedded themselves in the international community of Mars scientists to get up to speed on the latest science and to pick what aspects of the planet were best worth studying.

Hope will ride a Japanese H-2A rocket to orbit, lifting off from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan.

This booster has already sent aloft at least one interplanetary mission Japan's Akatsuki spacecraft, which studied the planet Venus. Other prominent missions launched on this rocket type include Selene (aka Kaguya) that studied the moon, the Ikaros solar-sailing spacecraft, and the Hayabusa 2 mission that plans to return a sample from the asteroid Ryugu in late 2020.

This artist's illustration shows the Hope orbiter making its way into space on top of the H-2A rocket. It will spend between seven and nine months traveling to Mars before arriving in orbit in May 2021 just in time for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Arab Emirates.

The satellite has a total mass, with fuel, of 3,300 lbs. (1,500 kilograms), according to NASA, and is about the size and weight of a small car.

The spacecraft is expected to last for at least two Earth years in Mars' orbit, but its mission can be extended to 2025 if the spacecraft remains in good health and funding is available for the mission extension.

This illustration shows in detail all the mission steps required to get Hope into orbit around Mars.

Shortly after launch, it will unfold its solar panels to recharge its batteries for the trip to Mars. As Hope approaches the Red Planet, it will use its star trackers to navigate and to enter the correct orbit.

The final orbit will be a 55-hour-long, slightly elliptical path around Mars that measures roughly 12,500 by 26,700 miles (20,000 by 43,000 kilometers). At its widest, the orbit of Hope is 10 times the diameter of Mars.

There are three main instruments on the Hope orbiter:

The Emirates Mars Infrared Spectrometer (EMIRS) looks at the Martian atmosphere's dust, ice clouds, water vapor and temperature profile.

The Emirates Exploration Imager (EXI) will image the Martian atmosphere to look for dust, water ice and ozone abundance.

The Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer (EMUS) is a spectrometer that will examine changes in the atmosphere and emissions of hydrogen, oxygen and carbon monoxide, among other things.

This is a closeup of the Emirates Mars Infrared Spectrometer (EMIRS).

In collaboration with Arizona State University, the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai designed EMIRS to measure the dust, ice clouds, water vapor and temperature profile of the Martian atmosphere. These observations will add on to other missions' work at the Red Planet and lead to a greater understanding of planetary atmospheres more generally.

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The United Arab Emirates' Hope mission to Mars in photos - Space.com

Science writer Kate Greene couldnt have known that her memoir about her time on a make-believe Mars mission would be published as millions of people on Earth isolated themselves in their homes for months amid a pandemic.

But her book is one of two about Mars published this month that are oddly well-suited to the present moment. Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars and Sarah Stewart Johnsons The Sirens of Mars are both about exploration. Yet theyre also about many different types of isolation and the human yearning to not be alone.

Greene participated in a mock Mars mission, called HI-SEAS, for Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, in 2013. She and five others lived in a dome on a rocky, barren patch atop Mauna Loa volcano for four months with no fresh food, no fresh air (all excursions were conducted in clunky spacesuits) and no instantaneous contact with the outside world.

NASA and other space agencies run such missions to figure out best practices for keeping astronauts sane and productive in isolated and stressful environments. Its well-documented that boredom can lead to mistakes or inattention. Other simulated Mars missions suggest that astronauts isolated together could develop an us-versus-them mentality that would lead the crew to stop listening to mission control, which could be dangerous on a long mission.

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With humor and sensitivity, Greene relates how her crew got along (or didnt), what she read, what she ate and the time-delayed e-mails she exchanged with loved ones back on Earth. Through the books series of essays, she uses the mission as a lens to examine everything from the ethics and economics of space travel to the nature of time, love and home.

Her descriptions of boredom and seclusion feel especially apt in a time of social distancing: the way certain aspects of your environment, daily schedule and conversations smooth over, lose their texture. Greene relates her experience to astronaut Michael Collins time orbiting in the Apollo 11 capsule alone while his crewmates walked on the moon. She connects both of those experiences to that of her brother, who spent the last year and a half of his life confined to a hospital room.

On this oasis of a planet, she writes, there are so many ways to feel isolated, each of us with the potential to sit with the terror of being alive and possibly alone in the cosmos.

The Sirens of Mars starts with a much broader view of Mars exploration. In lyrical, engaging writing, Stewart Johnson, a planetary scientist, chronicles how our perception of Mars has swung from a world teeming with life, to definitely dead and boring, and back again over and over since the invention of telescopes.

Stewart Johnson brings together a cast of characters to tell this history, from Galileo to the present-day team working on the Curiosity rover. Those characters include astronomer Carl Sagan, whose Cosmos TV series Stewart Johnson watched as a child. Sagan was almost ridiculed out of science for his obsession with exobiology.

She also introduces less famous but equally important people, like Sagans colleague Wolf Vishniac, whose Wolf Trap life-detection experiment was cut from NASAs life-hunting Viking landers in the 1970s. To get over his disappointment, Vishniac went searching for microbes in Antarctica and died in an accident there before the Viking missions launched (SN: 12/22/73).

In this sweeping history of human fascination with the Red Planet, Stewart Johnson also tells a personal story of finding her place in the world, from an inquisitive child to an unrooted adventurer to a wife and mother and member of a scientific team.

She makes a clear case that the search for life on Mars is an effort to not be alone. In one of the most poignant scenes in her book, she is hiking on Mauna Kea the next volcano over from Greenes Mars habitat and finds a fern growing amid the volcanic desolation.

It was then, on that trip, that the idea of looking for life in the universe began to make sense to me, she writes. I suddenly saw something I might haunt the stratosphere for, something for which Id fall into the sea. a chance to discover the smallest breath in the deepest night and, in so doing, vanquish the void that lurked between human existence and all else in the cosmos.

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Two new books explore Mars and what it means to be human - Science News