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Dr. Louisa Preston Louisa is an Astrobiologist at the Open University who, funded by the European Space Agency, designs and leads practice missions to Mars. When she’s not out testing rovers, astronauts and mission operations in earth’s most hostile environments, she’s studying the extreme forms of life that survive there, using infra-red spectroscopy to break in and find hidden life-markers trapped inside rocks: her goal is to understand how life thrives and how it gets preserved, in order to identify similar life on Mars and other planets and moons.