Habitability, Taphonomy, and the Search for Organic Carbon on Mars: Introduction to Special Issue

The quest for extraterrestrial life is an old and inevitable ambition of modern science. In its practical implementation, the core challenge is to reduce this grand vision into bite-sized pieces of research. In the search for organic remnants of past life, it is enormously helpful to have a paradigm to guide exploration. This begins with assessing habitability: Was the former environment supportive of life? If so, was it also conducive to preservation of organism remains, specifically large organic molecules?