My phone buzzed just as I was finishing filming with the BBC Sky at Night crew for an episode about Mars, having spent the day immersed in the high-resolution panoramas returned by the Curiosity and Perserverance rovers. A text from a researcher wondered if I’d be around to comment on embargoed research from scientists in Cambridge who had ‘found new tentative evidence that a farway world orbiting a different star to the Sun may be home to life’.
