Word: martianize
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Hurtling in from space some 16 million years ago, a giant asteroid slammed into the dusty surface of Mars and exploded with more power than a million hydrogen bombs, gouging a deep crater in the planet's crust and lofting huge quantities of rock and soil into the thin Martian atmosphere. While most of the debris fell back to the surface, some of the rocks, fired upward by the blast at high velocities, escaped the weak tug of Martian gravity and entered into orbits of their own around...
After drifting through interplanetary space for millions of years, one of these Martian rocks ventured close to Earth 13,000 years ago--when Stone Age humans were beginning to develop agriculture--and plunged into the atmosphere, blazing a meteoric path across the sky. It crashed into a sheet of blue ice in Antarctica and lay undisturbed until scientists discovered it in 1984 in a field of jagged ice called the Allan Hills...
What remains largely unspoken is the lingering hope that such a mission might experience, somewhere beneath the desolate Martian surface, a close encounter with organisms that are alive today...
What about the idea that Mars seeded Earth? Recent findings suggest there could have been substantial biological exchange between the planets. Every year, researchers calculate, two tons of Martian material rain down on Earth, and two tons of terrestrial rock smash into Mars. The chances that a primitive creature secreted in this rock may survive such a journey are beginning to look surprisingly good. It takes 10 million years or so for a piece of Earth to reach Mars, and some scientists argue, on the basis of organisms trapped in ancient amber, that bacteria can survive even longer...
WASHINGTON, D.C.: Tiny golden flecks in a 4.5 pound rock that tumbled out of space into an Antarctic ice field 13,000 years ago have yielded what may be the most significant planetary find in decades. After studying the Martian meteorite for two years, NASA and Stanford University scientists say they have discovered signs of life on Mars. President Clinton immediately announced a "space summit" in November to set strategy for exploring the finding. Said Clinton: "I am determined the American space program will put its full intellectual power and technological prowess behind the search for further evidence of life...