Pilbara

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As NASA’s Perseverance rover lands on Mars, UNSW is playing a key role in the search for life on the red planet. In July 2019, Professor Martin Van Kranendonk took a team of NASA and European Space Agency scientists to the Pilbara, in the Western Australian outback.

Luke Steller teaching students how to find fossils

As Perseverance prepares to launch for Mars, two UNSW PhD students look back on a field trip that gave Indigenous high school students a behind-the-scenes look at the rover’s upcoming mission.

Sea ice

This year's most popular science stories took readers from melting Antarctic ice sounding the alarm on microbes and climate change, to a pest-proof fence to protect native wildlife in far western NSW, and early signs of life in ancient rocks in the Pilbara, WA.

Pyrite

Western Australia’s famous 3.5-billion-year-old stromatolites contain microbial remains of some of the earliest life on Earth, UNSW scientists have found.

Scientist examining rocks

UNSW scientists have shown a group of Mars specialists the secrets of the remote Pilbara's ancient rocks - all in preparation for NASA's and ESA's Mars 2020 missions.

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The discovery of a piece of geyserite found in hot springs environment has changed our thinking our thinking about the origins of life on earth - and has implications for the search for life on Mars.

Pilbara

Life on the land could have started millions of years earlier on Earth than first thought. This could change the way we think about life developing elsewhere in the universe, writes Tara Djokic.

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Fossils discovered by UNSW scientists in ancient hot spring deposits in the Pilbara have pushed back by 580 million years the earliest known evidence for microbial life on land.