Extraterrestrial life of primitive life near the Rio Tinto river in Spain. NASA officials soon distanced NASA from the scientists' claims, and Stoker herself backed off from her initial assertions. Though such methane findings are still debated, support among some scientists for the existence of life on Mars exists. In November 2011, NASA launched the Mars Science Laboratory that landed the "Curiosity" rover on Mars. It is designed to assess the past and present habitability on Mars using a variety of scientific instruments. The rover landed on Mars at Gale Crater in August 2012. The Gaia hypothesis stipulates that any planet with
NASA Design Reference Mission 3.0 NASA Design Reference Mission 3.0 NASA Design Reference Mission 3.0 was a NASA study for a human space mission to the planet Mars in the 1990s. It was a plan for a human exploration architecture for Mars, and was released in 1998 as an addendum to the early design plans released in 1994. The plan is for a series of multiple launches to send various space transpiration, surface exploration hardware, and human crew to Mars, and to return the crew to Earth in the early 21st century. Various technologies are explored to launch the payloads into space, to send them