Martian soil perchlorate readings being caused by terrestrial sources, which at the time were thought could have migrated from the spacecraft either into samples or the instrumentation. However, each new lander has confirmed their presence in the soil locally and the "Mars Odyssey" orbiter confirmed they are spread globally across the entire surface of the planet. While our understanding of Martian soils is extremely rudimentary, their diversity may raise the question of how we might compare them with our Earth-based soils. Applying an Earth-based system is largely debatable but a simple option is to distinguish the (largely) biotic Earth from the abiotic
Planet the Drake equation, which estimates the number of intelligent, communicating civilizations that exist in the Milky Way. There are exoplanets that are much closer to their parent star than any planet in the Solar System is to the Sun, and there are also exoplanets that are much farther from their star. Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun at 0.4 AU, takes 88 days for an orbit, but the shortest known orbits for exoplanets take only a few hours, e.g. Kepler-70b. The Kepler-11 system has five of its planets in shorter orbits than Mercury's, all of them much more massive