NAS Looks at Mars Special Regions
NAS Report: Review of the MEPAG Report on Mars Special Regions
“At NASA’s request, the community-based Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG) established the Special Regions Science Analysis Group (SR-SAG2) in October 2013 to examine the quantitative definition of a Special Region and proposed modifications to it, as necessary, based upon the latest scientific results. Review of the MEPAG Report on Mars Special Regions reviews the conclusions and recommendations contained in MEPAG’s SR-SAG2 report and assesses their consistency with current understanding of both the Martian environment and the physical and chemical limits for the survival and propagation of microbial and other life on Earth. This report provides recommendations for an update of the planetary protection requirements for Mars Special Regions.”
I’m not sure how you could even do Planetary Protection with a human mission on Mars. Would it even be possible to completely sterilize the interior of an airlock as well as the exterior of their suits before they leave their lander/base?
It’s probably a good case for doing a couple of Surveyor-style lander missions to a targeted destination for a crewed mission to Mars beforehand. Equip them with drills that can down about 10 meters, and have them do testing to detect biological activity at the surface and further down. If they find anything, you’ve got a problem, if they don’t, well . . .
If you’re sending people to Mars, you essentially have no choice but to contaminate whatever location on the planet you land on. Even with suitports, if you sterilized the exterior of everything, you’d eventually get contamination of the seals, which would spread to the exterior. The moment they have to fix something that breaks, there’s little way to avoid touching it or breathing on it.
The COSPAR guidelines say manned missions should avoid the “special regions,” which are basically the polar areas and locations where seasonal streaking has been observed, and to take steps to avoid wantonly contaminating the environment.
But if you’re avoiding the locations where life might be located at, then you’re automatically undermining a big part of the science value of the crewed mission. You might as well just not send them at all, and just do a couple of deep-drill sample return missions with large robotic landers.
. . . Which is tempting, to be honest. Doing a crewed mission is going to require large-scale surface landings anyways, which can also be used for serious sample return missions and deep-below-surface robotic drilling landers. It’ll never be as versatile as having humans on site, but it can still be pretty good.
A manned mission to Mars destroys the scientific value of the discovery of any native Martian biology. The results can never be trusted, contamination is always going to be the most parsimonious explanation.
So the moment you okay a manned mission, you are saying you don’t care about discovering Martian life.