THE first Earthling to walk on Mars may have six legs. Charlie Cockell of the
British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge and his colleagues have found that insects
can tolerate surprisingly low pressures. “That means they could be brought in at
the early stages of terraforming Mars,” he says. The Martian atmosphere is 200
times less dense than Earth’s.
The researchers put a variety of insects in a vacuum chamber. As the pressure
dropped, the beasties first ran scared and then stopped moving. But at around 20
per cent of atmospheric pressure they resumed normal behaviour. At pressures as
low as…
