「媒库文选」从前，在火星上

参考消息网3月22日报道
Once Upon a Time on Mars
从前，在火星上
Dennies Overbye 丹尼斯·奥弗比
hree and a half billion years ago， waves splashed and streams surged across this dusty expanse on Mars now known as Jezero Crater. On a nascent Earth， chemistry was coagulating toward the exalted state we call life.
Astronomers， philosophers and science fiction writers have long wondered whether nature ran the same experiment there as on Earth. Was Mars another test tube for Darwinian evolution？
So humans have sent their progeny across time and 300 million miles of space in search of long-lost relatives， ancient roots of a family tree that might be traced in the Red Planet"s soil.
The Perseverance rover and its little sibling， the Ingenuity helicopter， landed in a cloud of grit on Feb. 18， bristling with antennas and cameras. Perseverance will spend the next Martian year — the equivalent of two Earth years — prowling， poking and collecting rocks from Jezero Crater and the river delta that enters it. The rover will scrutinize the debris chemically and geologically， and take photographs， so that scientists on Earth can search for any signs of ancient fossilization or other patterns that living organisms might have produced.