A multibillion-dollar robot dispatched to Mars to search for life.
A multibillion-dollar robot dispatched to Mars to search for life must steer clear of promising “hot spots” for fear of spreading microbes from Earth, NASA project scientists said last week. The specter of a missed opportunity was thrown into sharp relief by smoking-gun evidence unveiled last week that liquid water, a prerequisite for life, existed not only in a distant Martian past, but is likely there today. “Curiosity isn’t designed to go to a place that can currently support microbial life,” said Michael Meyer, a scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program. “For that we need a higher level of cleanliness,” which is more complicated and costly to achieve, he told AFP. This exasperating reality was the result of a fateful decision years ago to forego NASA’s most stringent microbe-removal standards for hardware visiting the moist environments in which Martian life — if it exists — will probably be found. The danger of letting Curiosity investigate the newly found s...