Do you know what a mafic rock is? 🪨 It’s a dark volcanic rock packed with magnesium and iron. That’s where the name comes from: ma for magnesium, fic from ferrum, Latin for iron. Basalt is the best-known kind. @astro.pablo.esa, @NASA’s Jasmin Moghbeli and JAXA’s @astro_kimiya are on the final leg of PANGAEA’s 10th edition, training in Lanzarote, one of Europe’s volcanic hot spots. They’re studying how these lava flows formed and looking for signs that water and volcanoes once met, two big clues in the search for life. So why Lanzarote? Because the lava fields on this Canary Island look a lot like the Moon’s maria, the huge dark plains of basalt you can spot from Earth without a telescope. Because when astronauts walk on the Moon again, most of the science team will be back on Earth. The crew will be their eyes and hands, reading the ground, choosing the right rocks to bring home and describing what they see clearly enough for geologists to follow from 384 000 km away. That’s what ...