Think of it this way: If the distance from Earth to the very beginning of space were the length of a baseball bat, the distance from Earth to the ISS would be about the length of a four-door car. “It will be the most valuable thing on Earth.” “A single sample… will change how we think about everything,” says Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science. The Earthlings in charge of this enterprise are, to put it mildly, almost giddy at the thought of getting their hands on Martian regolith. The rocket carrying samples will rendezvous with an orbiting spacecraft that will come back to Earth, bringing the soil samples with it. Another rover will then gather the samples, and the samples will be put in a rocket and launched from Mars. During the next 12 years or so, NASA and the European Space Agency will team up to send a rover to the red planet, where it will collect a variety of soil samples. It’s called the Mars Sample Return mission. But right now, there is a mission in the works to bring back dirt from Mars and see if life really is alien to the rest of the universe. And the rest of the universe: endless, sterile nonlife out to the ends of infinite creation. The part here, on Earth, with all the life. There are two kinds of places in the universe, as far as we know.
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