Ultimate success also depends on how much money they come up with, he added. Yopp thinks this group might have a good chance for success because of the international involvement. Fox's expertise lies in searching for life's origins. In a 1966 NASA report on biology and the exploration of Mars, Fox contributed a chapter explaining the procedures necessary for a search for life on Mars. Fox helped identify six amino acid precursors from moon samples returned by astronauts in the 1970s.
Amino acids are the building blocks of protein, a necessity for life.
Fox was awarded a special recognition from NASA in 1979 for results of the moon study. The Let's Return Together to Mars Program would hope to use Fox's methods to search for origins of any basic forms of Martian life that may have been missed by the Viking program. The first question that arises in a search for extraterrestrial life, Fox said, is whether life out there would be similar to life down here. Research leads him to conclude that those small building blocks of life would have to be similar. Experiments indicate that the highway to evolution of the first cells was very narrow,'' he said.