Could Mars host alien life?

Life on Mars could be possible, based on a breakthrough in the world's driest desert. The desert has similar conditions to the surface of Mars Planetary scientist Professor Dirk Schulze-Makuch, lead author of the desert study at Washington State University, said: 'It has always fascinated me to go to the places where people don't think anything could possibly survive and discover that life has somehow found a way to make it work. The evidence shows that these bacteria have evolved to live in the Atacama desert and adapt to its harsh conditions As Mars dried up and grew colder over its turbulent history, these organisms could have evolved many of the survival tactics seen in the Atacama Desert 'We believe these microbial communities can lay dormant for hundreds or even thousands of years in conditions very similar to what you would find on a planet like Mars and then come back to life when it rains.' Colonies of bacteria have survived in the driest regions of South America's Atacama desert, where it rains less than once a decade, for millions of years The scientists, from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, say if life remains on the red planet, it is likely hidden away in subsurface niches. 'If life ever evolved on Mars, our research suggests it could have found a subsurface niche beneath today's severely hyper-arid surface.'