1. Destination: Mars
http://www.earthandspace.org/long_mars.htm
2. NASA News: Meteorite Yields Evidence of Primitive Life on Early Mars
http://rsd.gsfc.nasa.gov/marslife/marslif6.htm
3. Skeptics Prepare to Challenge Mars Revelation
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9608/07/skepticism/index.html
4. Mars Research Inconclusive
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/march99/mars031999.htm
5. NASA: Alien Life More Likely to Be Found Outside Solar System
http://astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov/news/expandnews.cfm?id=1255
6. NASAs Mars Exploration Program: Goal 1: Determine if Life Ever Arose on Mars
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/science/life/index.html
7. SETI Institute
http://www.seti.org/Welcome.html
8. Malin Space Science Systems: August 2003 MGS MOC Image Releases
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2003/08/index.html
This Topic in Depth celebrates the tail end of the Mars opposition with a life sciences twist. As the first Web site (1) from the UK's Earth and Space Foundation explains: "Of all the planets in our solar system, Mars has perhaps loomed the largest in the popular imagination." Small wonder, then, that the Red Planet lit up the headlines when scientists at the Johnson Space Center and Stanford University claimed to have found fossil evidence of primitive life in an ancient Martian meteorite. A NASA press release (2) describes this 1996 study, which appeared in the journal Science. Amid the hullabaloo, however, skeptics warned that the evidence was weak. An archived article from CNN.com gives a sense of the opposition that formed around discovery right from the start (3). By the time the Washington Post article in the next Web site came out in 1999, the scientific community had largely rejected the original hypothesis (4). A February 2002 Web feature from NASA's Ames Research Center explains "There is a greater chance of discovering life outside our solar system than in it." The article includes hypertext links to related pages from NASA and other sources, and altogether provides a comprehensive overview of astrobiology (5). The Web site for NASAs Mars Exploration Program outlines past, present, and future missions to explore whether life ever arose on our nearest planetary neighbor (6). And what discussion of extraterrestrial life would be complete without mentioning the SETI Institute (7)? Finally, Malin Space Science Systems offers the latest images of Mars from the Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbiter Camera (8).