Mars too dry to sustain life

Telegraph : Researchers at Imperial College London have determined that life could not exist on the surface of Mars because of a super drought that lasted hundreds of millions of years, writes Nick Collins for the Telegraph. Experts spent three years studying individual soil particles collected in 2008 by NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft. Despite a warmer and wetter period in Mars’s distant past, the 5000 years or so that it lasted was simply too brief for life to have established itself on the surface. “Future NASA and ESA [European Space Agency] missions that are planned for Mars will have to dig deeper to search for evidence of life, which may still be taking refuge underground,” said Tom Pike, lead author of a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters.