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Penelope (Penny) Boston

Penelope (Penny) Boston, speleo-biologist and Director of Cave and Karst Science at New Mexico Tech, co-founded Mars Underground and then the Mars Society. She was a President of the Association of Mars Explorers, and is now a member of the science team taking part in Mars Arctic 365, a new one-year Mars surface simulation mission set to start in summer 2014 on Devon Island. Boston's work involves studying underground ecosystems extremophile inhabitants on Earth in order to predict environments/lifeforms possible elsewhere in the Universe. She has worked with the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program (NIAC) to develop protocols for both human extraterrestrial cave habitation, and for subterranean [underground] life-detection missions on Mars, which she believes is highly likely to exist. For the last 2+ decades Boston has focused on exploring caves. "The first time I did any serious caving was actually in Lechuguilla Cave ...We trained for about three hours, then we launched into a five-day expedition into Lechuguilla that nearly killed us! ... I had a blob of gypsum in my eye and an infection that swelled it shut. I twisted my ankle. I popped a rib … The bruises faded. My eye stopped being infected. … some of those gooey blobs drip[ed] down into my eye—but, I was like, 'Oh my God. This is biological. I just know it is.' So it was a clue. And, when, I got out, I knew I had to learn how to do this. I wanted to get back in there."

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