着陆

Photographs by Christopher Payne O n Mars, in the belly of a rover named Perseverance, a titanium tube holds a stone more precious than any diamond or ruby on Earth. The robot spotted it in 2024 along the banks of a Martian riverbed and zapped it with an ultraviolet laser. It contained ancient layers of mud, compressed into shale in the 3.5 billion years since the river last coursed across the red planet. Inside those layers, the rover found organic compounds. Its camera zoomed in and noticed leopard-like spots. Scientists had previously observed similar spotting patterns, but not on Mars. They’d seen them on Earth, in muds that once teemed with microbes. …