Astrobiologist Nathalie Cabrol: ‘I believe Mars still has some big surprises for us’

The director of the Carl Sagan Center on the possibility of life elsewhere in our solar system, what Venus can teach us about global heating, and what she thinks of Elon Musk

The astrobiologist Nathalie Cabrol was born in 1963 and raised near Paris. She completed a PhD at the Sorbonne on the evolution of water on Mars and moved to the US in 1994 as a researcher at Nasa Ames. She has worked extensively in the Atacama desert and the Chilean Andes, exploring how life adapts to extreme environments analogous to those on other planets. Cabrol, who lives in Northern California, is now the director of the Carl Sagan Center at the Seti [Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence] Institute. Her latest book, The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist's Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life, is published on 15 August.

How did you get interested in the heavens?
It's not difficult to be interested in the heavens, we are in the heavens! I have a recollection of watching the sky, aged five or six, and starting to ask myself: What is this all about? Why does this exist?"