Might the Mars Exploration Rover scientists find signs of ancient life, say, in Gusev Crater?
We’re pretty sure Gusev Crater was full of water. It was really a crater lake. The idea is that maybe if there was life in that lake and it died and settled to the bottom, it’s preserved in the sediments as fossils. We might find fossils right there on Mars, and that would be interesting. What I’d like to do next is then go down into the ancient terrain near the south polar region in the permafrost there and drill and try to find not a fossil but an actual dead martian organism frozen in the ground, a corpse, something we could do an autopsy on.
