One of the first steps toward this goal is to do some testing on the volcano crater lakes of the Chilean Andes, the same area where we participated in a world record breaking high altitude dive project to investigate the origins of life in extreme environments.
The NASA/SETI project is called The Planetary Lake Lander, and it is going on
right now ( November, December 2011)
I'll be following along with Dr. Cabrol and the rest of the research team during this exciting adventure on the expedition website; http://pll.seti.org/?cat=3