Nathalie Cabrol

layer of dust, or it can be a translucent rock.

And you see what we call endoliths.

These are the same cyanobacteria, but a different version of them.

They live inside the rocks, inside those crystals, because they have the best of life.

They are into translucent crystals so that they receive the light from the sun.

They can do the photosynthesis.

But there is enough of that crystal so that the nasty UV is being stopped.

And they are in their little house.

And when you are looking at temperature within those rocks, they tend to make it toastier than the outside temperature.

So there is a lot of things going on.

So what I'm saying for Mars is that, yeah, right now you don't have an atmosphere very much, 160 times thinner than the Earth.

Six millibars is really not much, but it's there.

But you still have a lot of UV, the short UV, like the nasty one, UVA, UVB, UVC, that can really mess up your DNA and destroy it beyond repair.

But as soon as you have a little alcove into a rock or a cliff,

You know, I'd be looking at those places, but you have to understand Mars, or any other planet for that matter, at the level that matters for the microbe.

Yes.

Be one with the microbes, which means that we have lots of orbital data, which is good to understand habitability at the planet level or at the regional level.

But we have very little data right now that is very useful to understand habitability at the scale that matters for the microbes at this point in time.

So we need to do a better job with that.

My idea is to have arrays of environmental stations that could have a lot of benefits.