 I'm Alex Price, I'm a third year PhD student here at the Open University and I'm working with the Astrobiology Research Group. It seems that the early Martian environment bore a lot of similarities to what we know about the early Earth environment and on early Earth we know that life originated and life got going and diversified. My research is focused on looking at organisms from Earth environments that have some applicability to early Mars. What we don't know is whether or not there was a separate origin of life on Mars, whether life ever could have originated there or been transferred there. What we're currently trying to do is to make the simulated early Martian conditions in our lab much more accurate and we do that by taking data from various Mars missions and working back to calculate the chemistry of the early Martian environment and the aqueous conditions that could have existed on early Mars. And then what we do is to subject microorganisms to the simulated early Martian conditions and to test out whether or not they can grow and divide happily or whether or not they perish under those harsher conditions. The second question that we really want to address is whether or not that life would leave behind traces of minerals in the rock record that we could detect using Mars missions today or in the near future. Could life have ever existed on Mars? What do you think?