Some scientists believe that if life exists on Mars, it could have been delivered there from Earth on interplanetary meteorites. With funding from NASA’s ASTEP program, a team of researchers is now putting together an instrument that could test this theory. The Search for Extraterrestrial Genomes (SETG) project would send an instrument to Mars to search soil or ice samples for the presence of Earth-like DNA. SETG will have its first field test this year.