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evening sitdown
Your evening longread: The search for life on Mars
It’s a coronavirus-free zone as we bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
Nasa launched its latest Rover to Mars yesterday. Here’s more about it, and about the search for life on Mars in general.
(The Verge, approx 10 mins reading time)
In 1976, NASA sent two landers, called Viking 1 and Viking 2, to the Martian surface to actively look for signs of life. While the pair learned a great deal about Mars, they didn’t turn up any compelling evidence that life had ever existed on the planet, putting a damper on the search for a while. But in hindsight, the Viking landers were not well-equipped to answer that ultimate question. “Compared to what we know today, they did not have a very sophisticated understanding of how to actually look for life,” says Farley.
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