Word: martianize
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That, in any case, is what the prevailing thinking has been. Now, however, it appears that thinking may be wrong. Last week NASA released a flurry of new images from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft that suggest that even today, water may be flowing up from the Martian innards and streaming onto the Martian surface--dramatically increasing the likelihood that at least part of the planet is biologically alive. "If these results prove true," says Ed Weiler, associate administrator of NASA's Office of Space Science, "[they have] profound implications for the possibility of life...
Finding liquid water on Mars' surface has never been easy--mostly because it simply can't exist there. The modern-day Martian atmosphere has barely 1% the density of Earth's, and the planet's average temperature hovers around a paralyzing -67[degrees]F. In an environment as harsh as this, any water that did appear would either vaporize into space or simply flash-freeze where it stood. What scientists studying Martian history have always looked for instead are clues that the planet's ancient water left behind--tracks where vanished rivers once flowed, basins where vanished seas once stood...
...images the Surveyor orbiter has beamed home in the nearly three years it has been circling Mars are full of this kind of expected hydro-scarring. But a handful of the pictures took scientists by surprise. In general, the older a Martian formation is, the more likely it is to have been distorted over the eons--smoothed by the planet's periodic windstorms or gouged by the occasional incoming meteor. A few of the newly discovered water channels, however, look as fresh as the day they were formed, leading astonished researchers to conclude that that day may have been remarkably...
Until they get the nod, the Mars partisans have to find ways to keep busy. Research teams from NASA and the Mars Society (a private advocacy group) are conducting expeditions to Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic--a place about as similar to the freeze-dried Martian wasteland as you're likely to find anywhere on Earth--to practice survival skills and exploration techniques. Teams at the Johnson Space Center are refining their mission scenarios and crunching their numbers to keep the costs as low as possible. "For now," says Zubrin, "the only thing between us and Mars...
...green bugs, under the more politically palatable label of astrobiology. Right now, NASA is eyeing the dusty surface of Mars (where water once flowed) and the likely ocean under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa as sites for primitive life-forms. One recent false alarm: the much trumpeted Martian meteorite found in Antarctica apparently does not contain convincing evidence of the existence of microorganisms on the Red Planet, as originally claimed...