I’m a space scientist. Utah is subsidizing my research with its health.

The U.S. just brought astronauts home from a Moon orbit for the first time in 50 years. The pride that followed this was real and deserved. I felt it.

Then I thought about Utah, and felt something more complicated. As Utah’s Great Salt Lake shrinks, it is becoming a valuable scientific asset — and the cost is being paid by the 2.5 million Utahns facing the severe consequences of its decline.

I am an astrobiologist. I study whether life could exist, or once existed, on other planets. To answer that question, I study places on Earth that resemble what those planets could have looked like when they still had water. I travel to salt flats, dry basins, and shorelines where the water is retreating and the minerals left behind preserve a record of what used to live there.

My job, essentially, is to learn how and why environments collapse after water leaves. This research depends on having living systems on Earth where that process is still ongoing —  places I can observe, sample, and compare against what our rovers are finding on Mars.

The Great Salt Lake is one of those places. When the lake’s water recedes, it exposes white salt terraces along the shoreline that bear a fair resemblance to mineral deposits discovered on Mars. Because of this, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory worked with Great Salt Lake researchers to test instrument methods before the Perseverance rover launched in 2020.

When the lake hit record lows two years later, a new round of shoreline samples found living microorganisms sealed inside salt crystals — the same preservation process the rover is now searching for evidence of........

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