NASA's hunt for life's origins on Mars echoes an ongoing search in Mexico

[Judi Lynn]

The Cuatrociénegas Valley is believed to contain clues to how life evolved. © DAVID JARAMILLO

NASA's recent Mars footage calls to mind one of Mexico's 'ecological time machines'
By Omar Vidal
Published on Thursday, March 11, 2021

This week, Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn aligned with the moon.

Images of Mars shared last week by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and China’s National Space Administration (CNSA) filled me with emotion, pride, and hope. They proved, once again, that there are no questions too big, nor frontiers too great for science and technology.

The colors of Mars’ landscapes and the sounds of the Martian wind make me dream of visiting that reddish-brown planet one day. It doesn’t matter to me that it is so far away, that it is desert-like, dusty, cold, and that all its volcanos have perished.

Mars’ valleys resemble seas, fluted by tiny wavelike curls. Mountain ranges and myriad craters with hallucinatory shapes. Mars is a place of dusty, gloopy, serpentine lands, its chocolate-brown dunes sculpted by fanciful winds over billions of years.

Martian winds have planetary echoes. It is a celestial body attended by two twin brother moons — Phobos and Deimos — the sons of Mars, the god of war, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

More:
https://mexiconewsdaily.com/opinion/hunt-for-life-cuatrocienegas/