📄FROM OUR PRINT MAGAZINE: Unraveling the mysteries of Mars through the lens of our own earth. Discover the story of Wolf Vishniac, a pioneer in extraterrestrial microbiology whose work on Earth fuels our understanding of the Red Planet today. 🔴🔵
Sign UpFor the first time in the history of our solar system, humans are collecting rocks from another planet. Since the Perseverance rover landed on Mars in early 2021, NASA scientists have been guiding it across the Jezero Crater, an ancient martian lakebed. When the rover reaches a site of geological interest, it drills out a small rock sample and seals it in a tube.
NASA’S Perseverance rover inspects rock with its robotic arm, as it seeking signs of past microbial martian life, in this artist’s illustration .Vishniac bent his head against the freezing wind, squaring his shoulders under a pack loaded down with scientific equipment. A crust of ice clung to his reddish beard as he trekked along a rough path in a place where winds gust to 100 miles an hour, scouring away moisture from the stone landscape.
The Viking mission to Mars would make Vishniac’s own sweep of imagination real. The mission was designed to put two landers on opposite sides of the planet, where each would scoop up a sample of martian dust, called regolith. Then Viking’s scientists would remotely conduct a series of biological and chemical experiments to test for the presence of life or, at the very least, the organic molecules that are life’s chemical building blocks.
But in 1972, the Wolf Trap showed that Horowitz and his colleagues had been wrong. Vishniac took samples from areas within the Valleys so dry that the particles became statically charged and jumped away from the collecting bag. Yet the addition of sterile water to this soil in the Wolf Trap revealed the rapid growth of bacterial cultures. The next year, in 1973, Vishniac returned to the Asgard Range to continue this work.
Since Friedmann’s discovery, scientists have found life in other seemingly impossible places. Around the same time, researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute discovered life in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, where it had been thought nothing could survive the searing hot temperatures. Life has since been found in hot volcanic rock deep beneath the Pacific Ocean, in toxic mining sludge, even growing on the walls of Chernobyl.
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