🛸 Message From Mars

The rover named Pebble had been rolling across Mars for four years. Its six wheels crunched over rust-colored dust while its camera snapped photo after photo.

One morning Pebble's drill found something strange: a thin white streak inside a rock. Scientists on Earth studied the picture and cheered. The streak was a mineral that only forms where water once flowed.

It took eleven minutes for Pebble's message to travel to Earth, because radio signals must cross millions of kilometers of space. Then the team sent instructions back: dig deeper.

Pebble obeyed. Each scoop of dust was a clue about whether tiny life could ever have lived on the red planet. Pebble was small and slow, but it was doing something enormous — asking a question the whole world wanted answered.

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