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The question of whether life ever existed on Mars has inspired scientists – and songwriters – for decades. The Red Planet is currently an arid, icy desert where no sign of life remains, but was it always this way?

It is widely recognised that living entities have three basic requirements: standing water, an energy source and the five chemical elements, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, phosphorus and nitrogen. Then a very long time for the chemical soup to stew. The rover Curiosity has found evidence of all three in certain areas of Mars, namely the Gale Crater, but were these available for long enough for life to develop?
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Unknown Country has been keeping a keen eye on the skies just recently, and with good cause: following the revelation last week that the Earth had narrowly escaped serious damage from 26 very sizeable asteroids over the past few years, another lucky escape was reported over the weekend.
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The risk of a sizeable asteroid colliding with the earth has always been purported to be extremely low, with scientists reporting that such an event was only likely to occur every twenty million years or so.

Unfortunately, our collective sigh of relief could be a little premature, as recent evidence suggests that, not only is the risk much higher than previously thought, but that such events are occurring regularly in our atmosphere. The new information has been released by an organisation known as the B612 foundation, a private collective whose mission is to detect and deflect dangerous asteroids.
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Astronomers are warning us that asteroid 2014 DX110 is on target to hurtle between the Earth and the Moon on Wednesday, passing close to our planet at a distance of just 217,000 miles (350,000km).

At 98ft (30m), 2014 DX110 is a relatively large object belonging to the Apollo class asteroid group, a class of Earth-crossing objects that pose a potential threat of impact. Scientists are currently aware of 240 Apollo asteroids, but it is thought that there could be at least 2000 Earth-crossers with diameters of 1 km or larger. If one of these giants hit Earth, it could carve out a crater about 10-20 times its own size.
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