{"id":3925424,"date":"2026-04-12T09:02:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-12T14:02:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/meet-orpheus-a-hopper-mission-built-to-hunt-for-life-in-martian-volcanoes\/"},"modified":"2026-04-12T09:02:14","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T14:02:14","slug":"meet-orpheus-a-hopper-mission-built-to-hunt-for-life-in-martian-volcanoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/meet-orpheus-a-hopper-mission-built-to-hunt-for-life-in-martian-volcanoes\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Orpheus\u2014A hopper mission built to hunt for life in Martian volcanoes"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>We&#8217;ve spent decades scratching the surface of Mars trying to uncover life there. But we&#8217;ve been searching a barren wasteland bombarded by radiation and bathed in toxic perchlorates. The entire time, it&#8217;s likely that it&#8217;s been too hostile to harbor extant life. So if we want a better shot at finding currently living life on Mars, we need to go underground. That is exactly the purpose of Orpheus, a proposed Mars vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) hopper mission put forth in a paper presented by Connor Bunn and Pascal Lee of the SETI Institute at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC).<\/div>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2026-04-orpheus-hopper-mission-built-life.html\" target=\"_blank\">Go to Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve spent decades scratching the surface of Mars trying to uncover life there. But we&#8217;ve been searching a barren wasteland bombarded by radiation and bathed in toxic perchlorates. The entire time, it&#8217;s likely that it&#8217;s been too hostile to harbor extant life. So if we want a better shot at finding currently living life on [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3925424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3925424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3925424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3925424\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3925424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3925424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3925424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}