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Life might have begun in bodies of water on land, perhaps in craters similar to Canada’s Lake Manicouagan, formed by an ancient impact. Credit: Planet Observer, Universal Images Group and Alamy
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On 18 February next year, a NASA spacecraft will plummet through the Martian atmosphere, fire its retro-rockets to break its fall and then lower a six-wheeled rover named Perseverance to the surface. If all goes according to plan, the mission will land in Jezero Crater, a 45-kilometre-wide gash near the planet’s equator that might once have held a lake of liquid water.
Among the throngs of earthlings cheering on Perseverance, John Sutherland will be paying particularly close attention. Sutherland, a biochemist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, was one of the scientists who lobbied NASA to visit Jezero Crater, because it fits his ideas about where life might have originated on Mars and on Earth.