NASA wants to crowdfund giant darts to throw at Mars

Is there life on Mars? Curiosity didn’t find any, but that’s hardly a conclusive answer. In fact, a handful of NASA scientists claim that the US space agency is looking for life in all the wrong places. The Mars rover explored the red planet’s dry, irradiated surface: if the planet still hosts life, it’s probably several meters underground. Now a team of scientists — including a few NASA veterans — are hoping to fund a mission to search for life under Mars’ surface. The project is called ExoLance, and its Indiegogo campaign hopes to pitch a series of high-tech darts at the red planet’s crust.

Mars almost definitely has water below its surface, and it’s possible that it might have life there too — buried deep in the soil, where it’s protected from dryness, radiation and temperature extremes. Unfortunately, NASA doesn’t seem too interested in looking for it, preferring to look for “conditions” that might support life instead. But a group of aerospace and robotics engineers — many of whom work for NASA, and one of whom even operates the Curiosity rover — think NASA should be going with a more direct approach, and they’re taking matters into their own hands. “While current NASA missions are looking for evidence of past life, no NASA mission is planned to look for current life,” they write on their website. “We believe this is a mistake. To find life on Mars, we actually need to look for life on Mars.” Part of the challenge of looking for life on Mars has been in designing the right equipment to dig for it. Curiosity was the first robot to drill into Martian soil. That was in 2013, and the hole was two inches deep. To search for life, robots have to dig a lot deeper than that. But scientists are struggling to come up with a design small enough to fit onto a rover yet robust enough to survive being pelleted with dust and radiation.