Nathalie Cabrol

So they were really our first feet on the ground on Mars, but they were lander.

They were not moving.

They were not going up.

It was already in the 90s, but we didn't have yet the Mars Global Surveyor and whatnot.

We still worked for 20 years.

We worked on that.

I did my master and my PhD thesis on Viking missions.

Well, that's the thing.

That's why I was looking at those images and saw some lakes.

And then came time where we started talking about sending landers and rovers on Mars and looking maybe at the possibility that Mars was habitable.

And lakes are particularly good places to look for those questions.

So this is how it all ties up.

I have been always curious about life in the universe and about questions on how we got to be here.

And the bigger question, now with 25 years more in that business, it's more about understanding the origin and nature of life rather than whether there is life or not on Mars.

I mean, this was really for me a stepping stone to bigger questions, but they were definitely important because they helped me frame life.

my way of thinking about those questions.

And so looking at Mars, at lakes, understanding what the conditions were 3.5 billion years ago or close to 4 billion years ago, then I knew the type of environment I needed to explore here on Earth as analogous to be able to understand what type of life still survives in those environments and what kind of instrument and what kind of resolution do I need

to actually detect it.

So this is how the whole thing started.

And it started with a small grant, literally 40K.