We had the pleasure of interviewing Maryse Napoleoni, a 3rd year PhD student in the Planetary Sciences and Remote Sensing group at Freie Universität Berlin. For her recent paper, “Mass Spectrometric Fingerprints of Organic Compounds in NaCl-Rich Ice Grains from Europa and Enceladus”, Maryse used special instruments on Earth to simulate what similar devices on space missions might see in plume material from icy moons.

In our inaugural Q&A for Astrobiology Revealed, we talk with astrobiologist Armando Azua-Bustos about his recent paper “Dark microbiome and extremely low organics in Atacama fossil delta unveil Mars life detection limits”. Armando discusses growing up in the Atacama Desert, why he thinks it's harboring 100 million-year-old DNA, and how we should (or shouldn’t!) be searching for life on Mars.