Motherboard – We May Have to Excavate Mars to Find Alien Life, NASA Says

Life might have existed on Mars billions of years ago, when the planet was wetter and warmer. This is why NASA’s Perseverance rover is tasked with collecting samples that might contain the fossilized remains of any ancient Martians, if they existed.  However, even if Martian fossils once littered the planet’s surface, those traces have likely been obliterated by eons of cosmic radiation, according to the first experiment that has ever mixed amino acids, the building blocks of life, with simulated Martian soil.  A team led by Alexander Pavlov, a space scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, found that amino acids located in the top 10 centimeters (four inches) of the Martian surface would likely be…

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