Life on Mars? Finding It May Require Humans on Red Planet

         Life may well lurk beneath the Martian surface today, but it'll be tough to detect without sending humans to the Red Planet, some experts say.

It could be a long time before robots are able to drill deep into the Martian underground, explore caves and investigate other potentially life-supporting habitats on the Red Planet. So if humanity wants to satisfy its curiosity about potential life on Mars anytime soon, it should work to get boots in the red dirt, advocates say.

"We might be lucky and confirm life with robots over the next one to two decades, but it's probably going to take people to do, literally, the heavy labor to be able to do it," said Chris Carberry, co-founder and executive director of Explore Mars, a nonprofit organization dedicated to human exploration of the Red Planet. 
 
Most scientists think the frigid, dry and radiation-bombed Martian surface is unlikely to host life as we know it today. But conditions could be much more benign in underground environments such as caves or lava tubes, providing potential refuges for microbes.

"The subsurface is going to be radically different from the surface," astrobiologist and cave scientist Penny Boston, a professor at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, told SPACE.com late last year. "Every indication we have from caves of all different kinds all over this planet [Earth] shows that it doesn't take much separation vertically for a radically different environment."

Indeed, the Martian subsurface is known to harbor water ice, and several recent studies suggest that pockets of liquid water may exist beneath the red dirt as well. Here on Earth, life thrives pretty much anywhere liquid water is found, so the possibility of current Martian aquifers excites astrobiologists.

source: space.com