The Many Martian Face Lifts
How old the Martian surface might be, affects estimates for its potential time to develop or sustain possible life. A new estimate for when volcanoes might have covered up ancient crater impacts, has geologists recounting the age of Mars.

Mars: Cold, Dry, Red and Dead?
The theory of a warm, wet past for Mars comes under scrutiny based on impact craters analyzed by a Colorado and NASA Ames research team. Their new Science article looks at the implications for ancient life on the Red Planet - if indeed, the weather has been bad.

Martian Meteor's Magnetic Makeup
A 4.5 billion year old Martian meteorite, and the new evidence that one quarter of the meteorite's magnetic material derived from ancient bacteria. The latest results, published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, relied on six physical properties called the Magnetic Assay for Biogenicity (or MAB).

Doubts About Meteor Fossils
A response by the JSC Mars Meteorite Team regarding a paper "Magnetite morphology and life on Mars" by Buseck et al. that appears in the 19 November 2001 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Taking a Meteorite's Temperature
A chunk of Mars that was hurled to Earth remained cool enough to preserve any microorganisms aboard. So says a group of researchers who have examined martian meteorite ALH84001.

Murchison's Amino Acids: Tainted Evidence?
Few meteorite discoveries can rival the one that fell in 1969, just 60 miles north of Melbourne, Australia. Called the Murchison meteorite, the rock's interior showed signs of the protein building blocks of life. But whether those amino acids arose after the rock fell is one question that the experts still debate three decades later.