...” The following day crackled with excitement. Headlines announced that NASA had discovered possible evidence for ancient life on Mars, more to come at a press conference that afternoon. Prior to the event, President Clinton stood on the South Lawn of the White House to share his enthusiasm over the NASA findings. If confirmed, he said, the discovery would rank as “one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered” and he vowed that the space program would “put its full intellectual power and technological prowess behind the search for further evidence of life on Mars.” Soon after, NASA presented to the world a nondescript chunk of stone. Mounted on a blue velvet cushion within the protective walls of a Plexiglas case, the potato-sized stone was introduced as ALH84001, a rare type of meteorite that had its genesis on the planet Mars. Rarer still was the cargo it carried. Over the course of the preceding two and a half years, a team of NASA researchers and outside collaborators examining the meteorite had uncovered mineralogical, chemical, and structural oddities that, taken together, amounted to strong evidence for biological activity in Mars’ distant past.Seated before a packed auditorium at NASA’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, members of the research team—David McKay, Everett Gibson, Kathie Thomas-Keprta, and Richard Zare—each took to a microphone ttell their portion of the story of the stone.
