Question: is there any possibility of finding life on mars and if there was how would you know?

Natasha Stephen answered on 13 Jun 2014:

We are looking for evidence of past life on Mars at the moment but unfortunately I don’t think that we will find actual life living on Mars at the moment.

Mars is a very strange planet; it has some of the largest volcanoes and mountains in the solar system (3 times as high as Everest!), it has huge canyons like the Grand Canyon and there is evidence that rivers once flowed on the surface. But, Mars is now geologically dead; there is no movement on the surface other than wind and there is no water. The atmosphere is almost pure carbon dioxide (CO2), which is poisonous to us, and it’s also really cold! Life as we know it couldn’t survive there now without a spacesuit!

If we did find evidence of past life though, there would be lots of checks by lots of scientists to make sure that it was actually evidence of life; we’d want to check and make sure that the ‘biosignature’ is true. These are amino acids that are found in every living thing on Earth and sometimes found in meteorites. If we found them on Mars, it would be a good indication of life!