Mark Twain didn’t think much of California’s Mono Lake. “It lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert,” he wrote in his 1872 travelogue, Roughing It. “This solemn, silent, sailless sea–this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth–is little graced with the picturesque.” Astrobiologist Richard Hoover of NASA’s National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) in Huntsville, Alabama, has a different view: “It’s beautiful,” he says.