Have you ever wondered what is life? Why would we look for it in space? How should we search for it? If there is life in space, does it look like anything we have ever seen before on Earth? From studying craters on the Moon and on other planetary bodies, we now know that Earth, Mars, and other planets were pummeled with asteroids and comets, mostly during the first billion years of our solar system. These impacts were so large they could impact one planet, knock part of it into space, and have fragments of it end up on another world. In this way, around 1 billion tons of rock went between Earth and Mars, mostly from Mars to Earth.

Life could have hitched a ride, and if so, any life on Mars could be related to life on Earth. Dr. Christopher Carr from MIT, and Delson Faria Da Silva (Mechanical Engineering, '20) from WIT share with us what they have been developing to detect life on Mars: The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Genomes (SETG) instrument.

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