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“I did not see myself in an astrobiology lab,” Flores said from her office at the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, where she has worked since 2023 as an engineering associate.

While Hays, deputy program scientist for NASA’s astrobiology program, watched it land, she thought of a different mission — her mission, called Mars Sample Return, or MSR, set to launch later this decade.

Students in my astrobiology class got lectures live from Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“It’s almost like a science-fiction story wrapped up in a paper,” says David Grinspoon, senior scientist for astrobiology strategy at NASA’s headquarters in Washington DC.

Because its present-day chemistry and mineralogy are virtually unchanged since its formation, it holds clues to the origins and development of rocky planets such as Earth, and could prove central to studies of astrobiology.