Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2018

29 JULY-AUGUST 2018 ASTROBIOLOGY tivity or population decline in winter. Forms of life comparable to our ar- chaeobacteria or anaerobic bacteria could be the cause of the observed phenomenon, and even in this case, a specially-designed automatic mission should not have diffi- culty in finding them. The first decisive an- swers could come from NASA’s Mars 2020 mission and ESA’s ExoMars mission, both of which involve the use of a rover to look for traces of past or present martian life. While the Mars 2020 rover will prepare soil sam- ples to be transferred to Earth for an accu- rate study in laboratories, the ExoMars rover will be able to carry out by itself lab- oratory analysis, taking samples of rock up to 2 meters deep, and could therefore be the first to give a positive answer about the existence of life on Mars. The latest find- ings of Curiosity and several other previous extraordinary observations indicate that we are on the right path in the search for traces of martian life. Attributing an abiotic explanation to all of the observed processes that have emerged in recent years from the study of the mar- tian environment is becoming increasingly difficult. !