Mars Icebreaker Life Mission

Missions to Mars have only scratched its surface. To go deeper, scientists are proposing a spacecraft that can drill into the Red Planet to potentially find signs of life.

The driving goal for exploring Mars is finding signs of life, said planetary scientist Christopher McKay at NASA’s Ames Research Center. There are mountains of evidence that Mars was once home to liquid water on its surface, and virtually wherever there is water on Earth, there is life. Some researchers have even suggested that life on Earth may have originally come from Mars, stemming from microbes in rocks blasted off the Red Planet by cosmic impacts — some 220 pounds (100 kilograms) or so of meteorites from Mars are known to have landed on Earth.