The new Mars rover was named Curiosity because it hopes to answer one of the greatest questions of modern man: Are we really Martians?
A few billion years ago, Mars may have been a planet covered with oceans. We’re not sure what happened (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show), but we do know that the liquid has mostly burned away. Curiosity will probe the soil that they left behind in order to look for tiny fossils.
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In a finding of significance in the search for life beyond Earth, scientists have discovered what appears to be a body of liquid water the volume of the North American Great Lakes locked inside the icy shell of Jupiter’s moon Europa–which could represent a new potential habitat for life.
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When our satellites search for other planets that might harbor life, they always search for water. But now, for the first time, astronomers have detected around a burgeoning solar system a sprawling cloud of water vapor that’s cold enough to form comets, which could eventually deliver oceans to dry planets. And with oceans, life could spring up–or maybe migrate to the planet from another place.
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One reason we may not have discovered the definitive answer to the question of whether there is life on Mars is because we have not used the right TOOLS to detect it. But now NASA is getting ready to send a life-detection tool to Mars that is 1,000 times more sensitive than previous instruments. Astronomer Jeffrey Bada says, "The bottom line is that if life is out there, the high-tech tools of chemistry will find it sooner or later. It certainly is starting to look like there may be something alive out there somewhere, with Mars being the most accessible place to search."
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