High Lakes May Yield Clues to Life on Mars for National
Geographic News |October 27, 2003| Next month Nathalie Cabrol
and colleagues hope to slip into drysuits, don masks, and dive,
without the aid of an oxygen tank, into a lake tucked into the
crater of a 19,734-foot (6,014-meter) tall volcano on the border
between Chile and Bolivia. If they succeed, they will tie a
world record for the highest "free dive." "I'm less interested
by the record than by what we will be wearing," said Cabrol, a
planetary scientist with the NASA Ames Research Center and SETI
Institute in Moffett Field, California. The researchers will be
wearing CPODS, specially-outfitted suits that will record their
vital signs and transmit them, in real time, back to NASA Ames.
"It's the first time we've done real-time," said John Hines,
manager of the astrobionics group at NASA Ames, which is
developing the technology. The suits, also known as LifeGuard
devices, are prototypes of technology that the space agency is
developing to monitor astrona