Curiosity and Martian Water: Look But Don't Touch
If the Mars rover finds water, it could be H2 … uh oh!, LA Times
“On Nov. 1, after learning that the drill bit box had been opened, Conley said she had the mission reclassified to one in which Curiosity could touch the surface of Mars “as long as there is no ice or water.” Conley’s predecessor at NASA, John D. Rummel, a professor of biology at East Carolina University, said, partly in jest: “It will be a sad day for NASA if they do detect ice or water. That’s because the Curiosity project will most likely be told, ‘Gee, that’s nice. Now turn around.’ ” If water is found, Curiosity could still conduct tests from a distance with instruments including a laser and spectrometers.”
Mars Rover May Be Contaminated with Earth Microbes, NPR
“… what we would do is we would take a step back, and we would convene a panel of scientific experts to review the whole procedure, look at the amount of ultraviolet light that might’ve been hitting the drill bit that would be burning, you know, giving all those organisms sunburn. There are a small number of organisms on the rover, many, many fewer than there are on the palm of your hand. But there are a few. So we would convene this panel of experts. We’d look at the conditions at Gale Crater. We’d consider what the characteristics of this potential water or ice might be, and then that panel would decide how we should proceed with the potential to study that.”
There never was a “bio barrier” on the pre-mounted drill bit or the drill bit box to be “opened”. The bits on Curiosity were always exposed.
The fact that this was a surprise means that the PP people weren’t paying attention. This doesn’t surprise me. One minute they tell you one thing, then 6 months later they want the opposite.
The vikings have already contaminated Mars. There was no PP policy back then.
It’s unwarranted overcaution, since any water that would be liquid at the Gale crater site is going to be cold and hypersaline. The only terrestrial organisms that could thrive there would be halophilic extremophiles– which are not the kind of bacteria that might hitchhike to Mars from KSC.
In any case, though, Viking was sterilized: http://www.sciencedirect.co…
add in the UV and radiation that bathes the rover itself – and the clean room standards practiced for handling of all space hardware and I suspect the risk is rather low. They could drive over to the descent stage and dip the drills in rocket fuel contamination too 😉
“In any case, though, Viking was sterilized:”
Sure, but to less than even today’s standard cleanroom levels, and nothing like what they enforce now.
I can almost guarantee that the Vikings landers’ RTGs are covered in live bacteria & mold today.
I worked in the LMA cleanrooms with the 98 orb & landers, and the cleanliness & microbial sampling was almost overbearing. Those same people I worked with had worked on Viking back when it was Martin Marietta. They said the cleanliness was nothing like modern requirements back “in the day”.
The comments in the abstract you posted are mostly to avoid contaminating the science instrument results, not so much the Martian environment.
UV sterilization of surgical instruments is less stringent than the environment that the Viking Landers RTGs are exposed to. Unless it’s an extremophile, it won’t live on Mars.
Chances are Mars was potentially contaminated before Viking — they may not have worked, but at least 2 Mars probes from USSR/Russia made it to the surface.. did THEY have any PP policy?
I’m sort of curious how much biological material from the Earth made the journey to Mars after the K-T event? While it would be perhaps worth preserving after a fashion, if a hunk of a peat bog landed on Mars, it would be oozing with microorganisms and may have even preserved some multi-cellular life as well.
My own opinion is that life has been exchanged frequently between the Earth and Mars enough to perhaps even suggest that any life on Mars, if found, may even have a common ancestor to life on the Earth even if that life has been on Mars for millions of years or longer.
Eventually somebody is going to need to take a dump on Mars, and when that happens there will be so many microbes involved that these kind of worries about a few microbes that survived the trip on this space probe will literally be laughed about. Or is the goal really to treat Mars as having a status like a National Park saying humanity can never go there to visit at all?
“My own opinion is that life has been exchanged frequently between the Earth and Mars enough to perhaps even suggest that any life on Mars, if found, may even have a common ancestor to life on the Earth even if that life has been on Mars for millions of years or longer.”
Another possibility is that prokaryotic life developed in the ice/dust nebula that formed the sun (and its sibling stars). We keep seeing more complex organic molecules in such nebula. We’ve never hit that point where we find, “This complex, no further”, if we can detect it, we do. It’s tantalising (in at least two meanings of the word.)
If so, then Earth, Mars, Europa, the cloud-tops of Venus and the gas giants, Titan and every comet in the solar system would have been drenched with life from the moment of formation. If we can get clean samples from Earth (duh!), Mars, Europa, and various comets, then by comparing the differences and similarities (as we do on Earth between genera/biomes), we might be able to date the last universal common ancestor. Did it form in the solar system, with the solar system’s stellar nebula, or does it even pre-date that? In which case, our entire Galaxy is filled with a single pervasive interconnected life-bearing cloud (and thus so too every exo-planet.)
Isn’t that knowledge at least worth a small delay before we literally crap all over Mars?
“Or is the goal really to treat Mars as having a status like a National Park saying humanity can never go there to visit at all?”
Not a National Park, a crime scene. And just until the case is solved, and we know who did what to whom.
I find abiogenesis on planet way more likely than some ice/dust nebula. Interplanetary panspermia is merely very, very unlikely. Interstellar panspermia is just plain simply impossible. If Europa and Titan have life, it must be from separate abiogenesis – Europa due to isolation under many km of ice, and Titan due to very different environment.
The traditional (Hoyle/Wickramasinghe) idea of panspermia being due to debris kicked up from planets, travelling to extra-solar planets? No. I agree, massively impossible.
What I’m talking about it the development of self-catalysing molecules in the interaction of the dust and ice clouds of a stellar nebula. Dozens to thousands of stars-worth of matter in each nebula, environments from near a new-born star, to deep space in the middle of a molecular cloud, and everything in between, low energy accretion to high energy collisions.
And lab work that shows the basic soup of organic molecules are just as likely to form on ice/dust grains in a vacuum bathed by radiation, as it is in the primordial atmosphere, zapped by lightning. And astronomy confirms that anything we’re capable of of detecting, is detected (we haven’t hit a complexity wall yet.)
And it gives you billions of years to brew the cocktail of chemical precursors, rather than the hundred million or so years on primordial Earth.
[Only a theory. The point being, you need indisputably pristine samples from a variety of non-terrestrial sources to genuinely rule it out.]
Vikings… contaminating Mars….
Would that be, um, Eric the Red?
Sorry. Irresistible.
If they find water, drill the damn hole.
Planetary Protection = Environmentalist revision = Take no risk. Why even explore if there’s no risk involved. We have six probes on Mars now with Vikings 1 and 2,Sojourner/Pathfinder,Spirit,Opportunity and Phoenix following Curiosity,I’m sure that some contamination did occur with the previous probes but risk were taken then and should be now.The project managers being over cautious just doesn’t make any sense.Just do the mission and shut up!
Actually planetary protection is a valid concern regardless of one’s environmentalism viewpoints. You really do not want to spend billions to send instruments to Mars only to discover terrestrial contamination.
Yes -especially for providing critical science product that might hinge trillions in future budgets, human perspective on life beyond earth, and perhaps even major human destiny. In a word, BIG.
Yet it is hideously overcomplicated to discuss. With experts. Now try to explain this to anyone else – they”ll find it silly, absurd, or simply “stupid”.
My attempt to get involved and “boil the ocean” left me with the impression that the experts weren’t disciplined enough with separating out the axiomatic parts that they should deal with, from the hypothetical parts that creep into the discussion that shouldn’t be allowed, because they were the root of the overcomplexity. It goes to the roots of why biology is considered mostly in descriptive terms, and thus a “softer”, “vaguer” science than the “hard” physics and math.
In mathematical terms, they were trying to exceed Godel’s theorem of incompleteness. To try to exceed the knowledge of what is currently possessed (as bounded axioms alone), because they know our limited knowledge of biological systems. But that, in the end, is all they can really do.
To quote Clint Eastwood – “A man’s got to know his limitations”.
Drill the damn hole. Extremophiles that may exist won’t be any more affected by the sterile environment of an overheated drill bit against rock than residuals on the bit. Once “locally sterilized”, sample elsewhere. This is more than good enough.
What a joke…
You folks are concerned about a potential “contamination” from an Earth robotic probe, yet are completely oblivious to the POSSIBILITY of an impact causing something from Earth being ejected into a Mars trajectory. Everyone is quick to entertain the thought that it may be a Martian meteoroid that “seeded” Life on Earth, but is completely blind to the fact that it COULD be the opposite.
John,
I don’t think anybody here is ignorant of the possibility of planetary material being transferred. It’s an idea that’s been around a long time, right up to the transpermia and panspermia concepts. But those are not man-made events, but rather (theoretically) nature’s way to doing certain things. But man-made events are something we can control, at least to an extent, and just like planetary protection of Earth makes sense, planetary protection of other places we go makes sense, because we can limit the degree to which it is happening, instead of overtaxing a biosphere/surface the way we have on Earth. Is this an important issue? I’m sure we’d get arguments both ways, but one thing is certain — if we “pollute” a planet past a certain point, we can no longer restore it to its original state, should that be necessary later on. And that, to me, is sufficient reason to keep things as clean as possible.
Steve
It’s a theory. And if we discover life on Mars we can start to test that theory. Provided we haven’t contaminated Mars first.
Otherwise, how will we tell the difference between life that evolved on Mars and transferred to Earth, and Earth-life that came to Mars on poorly sterilised rovers?
[There are ways, but they are much more involved, much harder to prove conclusively, in an area which will be very controversial.]
Common sense again lololol
“Unwarranted overcaution” just about nails it. Curiosity’s mission goals will not be compromised by the bit switch, Gale is an extremely hostile environment and will contain any contamination, and if the goal was to prevent any Earth microbes from reaching Mars under any circumstances, that ship sailed forty years ago (or thirteen years ago if you count ice). It’s important to be careful near any environment where introduced microbes could reproduce and take over (Lake Vostok, possibly Europa). However, icy soil on Mars isn’t one of those environments.
If Mars is lifeless, outside human contamination, then I have no problem with Mars becoming contaminated. (Likewise Europa and Lake Vostok.)
If it’s not, then that life is scientifically useful. So many theories about the formation of life on Earth that could be tested if we had non-terrestrial life to compare. It’s also politically/ideologically huge. So if we get a “positive”, we want to know damn well it isn’t just the crud off our own boots.
(But once we have suitable samples safely stored, I still don’t care if Mars is then contaminated by Earth-life. Bacteria don’t prick my Green-alarm. But there’s no reason to rush, we’ve got the whole rest of the solar-system to explore/exploit/colonise. There’s also no reason to make hasty assumptions.)
In 10 years it won’t matter.
http://mars-one.com/en/
MArs One is fantasy.
Phoenix got water on its legs. Was it all sterile?