[meteorite-list] Mars rover pollution

From: mark ford <markf_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Jul 19 04:26:01 2005
Message-ID: <6CE3EEEFE92F4B4085B0E086B2941B313B2D9A_at_s-southern01.s-southern.com>

Hi,

I'd like to chip in here as this is one of my all time major soapbox
issues!

The point about sterilising the Rovers being 'very difficult' is a fair
one, but how the hell can you send a probe to potentially look for signs
of life, when it is carrying unknown and possibly yet-undiscovered
bacteria????

There are plenty of microbes on Earth which could survive on Mars, there
may well be some yet undiscovered ones that could thrive on mars for all
we know.

What ever the case, IF we find life on Mars (I don't personally believe
we ever will) but we will never be 100% sure that it is not an unknown
terrestrial organism released into the Martian atmosphere by human
activity, the mars life experiment is already a failure in my book!

I am sorry but when I see pictures of technicians arrogantly drinking
coffee and not wearing masks when they are constructing such vital
scientific probes/rovers It really annoys me, how dare they, we are not
talking about a communications satellite, but a pristine vitally
important [entire planet].

I don't even drink coffee when I am working on industrial electronics
let alone space probes!! The standards of work at JPL/Nasa are clearly
in need of an overhaul.

I am sure they could have sterilised the rovers once in space if they
had the will, and once the rovers have finished their task on the
surface they could have initiated some kind of auto-sterilise/destruct
sequence using explosives, to prevent internal contamination leaching to
the outside world once the rovers degrade, got to be better than
spraying with ethane and hoping that the odds make it 'unlikley' -
unlikely is not good enough.

Still it's too late know.

Best
Mark Ford
Received on Tue 19 Jul 2005 04:25:12 AM PDT