Hello everybody! This is J.S. Pailly reporting in from the surface of Mars, and today I have a big announcement. Life. I’ve discovered life on Mars!

As most professional astrobiologists would have expected, there are no “people” on Mars, nor any signs of animal or plant life. No, the life forms I’ve discovered are microorganisms.

You might be wondering how even microorganisms can survive in the harsh Martian environment, where it’s so cold and so dry, and where toxic perchlorate salts are scattered basically everywhere.

But it turns out those perchlorate salts, which are so hazardous to human life, are the very reason why Martian life is possible.

You see when I first arrived on Mars and started growing my own food here, I sort of forgot about those deadly perchlorates. And yet my crops still grew in the Martian regolith, and I didn’t succumb to the kinds of severe thyroid disorders that perchlorates can cause in humans. Why not? Because something was eating the perchlorates.

The idea that microorganisms might gobble up perchlorate salts shouldn’t come as a surprise. Back on Earth, certain species of anaerobic bacteria, such as Dechloromonas aromatica, can actually help fight pollution by cleaning up perchlorate-contaminated drinking water. D. aromatica will actually swim toward perchlorates and chemically reduce them to produce the energy they need to live. The native Martian microbes must do something similar.

Of course I should make this disclaimer: while I may be here on the surface of Mars, I’m still just a blogger. NASA or some other space agency should still send some qualified astronauts to confirm my findings. Even so, my preliminary research says these Martian microbes are totally real, and they’re rather conveniently helpful too!

A few years ago, NASA astronauts started growing lettuce aboard the International Space Station. This was a big deal. The day the astronauts finally got clearance from mission control to eat their lettuce, it made headlines.

Except I remember there was something about this story that really didn’t make sense to me at the time, and honestly still doesn’t. Supposedly getting to eat fresh lettuce was a huge morale booster for the I.S.S. crew. Look, I get this was an important proof of concept, demonstrating that it is possible to grow food in space. But lettuce… a morale booster?

Speaking as someone who’s currently living on the surface of Mars, I can assure you that lettuce is just as exciting here as it was back on Earth.

Of course the reality of living on Mars is that you have to stick to a vegan diet. You simply don’t have the room or resources to raise livestock (although as our presence on Mars grows and our habitat structures expand, it may be possible to bring some animals over… but that’s a topic for future posts).

Fortunately experiments back on Earth using Mars regolith simulant have shown than a great many vegetables should be able to grow in Martian soil, not just lettuce. We’ve already talked about potatoes and sweet potatoes. Also according to this article, the research on tomatoes, peas, spinach, and several other crops looks promising.

That’s encouraging news, but that same article also warns that Martian regolith contains elevated levels of metals, such as iron, arsenic, and lead. This is a “further research is required” thing, but it’s possible that plants could absorb some of those metals, meaning my Mars lettuce might end up giving me lead poisoning.

I wish someone had mentioned that to me before I started growing all these crops in Martian regolith.

Today I’m continuing my totally-for-real, I’m-not-making-this-up exploration of Mars. I’m really here on the surface of Mars, walking around and doing science—or rather bouncing around in the low gravity and gawking at cool Mars things.

Last week we talked a bit about my efforts to grow potatoes in Martian regolith, based on experiments conducted by the International Potato Center back on Earth using a “Mars regolith simulant.” I ended up doing a bit of research about what, precisely, a Mars regolith simulant is. Turns out these’s a pretty long history to this stuff.

The earliest simulant appears to have been developed at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and is know as JSC Mars-1. It was made using volcanic ash from Hawaii and the recipe was based on data collected by NASA’s Viking and Pathfinder missions.

As we’ve learned more about Mars, there have been several newer generations of simulant, such as JSC Mars-1a, MMS-1 and MMS-2 (which have been made available for sale to the general public), and most recently JMSS-1, which was developed by the Chinese.

But going back to the original JSC Mars-1, I read something in this article that surprised me: “Approximately 25 wt% of the sample can be lifted with a hand magnet.” Since I’m here on the surface of Mars, that gave me an idea….

Given how much iron is contained in Martian regolith, what happened next shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise. When I touched my magnet to the ground, most of the Mars-dust didn’t stick, but some of it did.

This is consistent, by the way, with the findings of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Magnets attached to the rovers’ Rock Abrasion Tools (R.A.T.) accumulated dust particles as the rovers chipped away at Martian rocks. It’s noteworthy that the R.A.T. magnets collected different colors of dust at different locations, indicating that there are many different kinds of magnetic particle on Mars. Spirit and Opportunity also conducted what’s known as the Magnetic Properties Experiments (M.P.E.), which used magnets to draw stray dust particles out of the Martian atmosphere.

It seems like you’ll find magnetic particles just about everywhere on Mars. Again, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. There’s a lot of iron, mostly in the form of hematite and magnetite, on the Martian surface. But still, this is a weird and awesome thing to see in action, at least from an Earthling’s perspective.