Potrillo Volcanic Field
Searching for Mars microbes by the PIXL
When NASA selected instruments for the Mars 2020 rover in 2014, a basketball-sized device from Stony Brook University made the cut. The PIXL, Planetary Instrument for X-Ray Lithochemistry, mapped the elemental chemistry of rocks point by point at a scale the size of a grain of salt, a precision no previous rover instrument could match. Its goal was finding signatures that microbial life might have left behind.
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