在智利阿塔卡马沙漠寻找火星生命的蛛丝马迹
In northern Chile, the Atacama Desert stretches for over a thousand kilometers, a landscape so parched that some parts have not seen rain in centuries. Here, under a sky that blazes with ultraviolet light by day and reveals the Milky Way by night, astrobiologist Dr. Elena Vargas searches for life where most people assume none could exist. She is part of a growing field that uses Earth's most extreme environments as natural laboratories for understanding how life might survive on Mars.
Each morning, Vargas and her team drive out to the desert floor, past salt flats and volcanic rock, to collect samples of soil and dust. They wear protective suits not to shield themselves from the environment, but to avoid contaminating it with microbes from their own bodies. Back in a mobile laboratory, they examine the samples under high-powered microscopes, looking for traces of DNA or metabolic activity in the seemingly sterile ground. Sometimes they find nothing; other times, a single bacterium reveals itself, clinging to a grain of sand.
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