When NASA broke the news Monday that it had found evidence of liquid water on Mars, it was a major announcement that implies the Red Planet might harbor some form of life. Unfortunately, in-depth analysis will have to wait.
As reported by CNET and The Guardian, scientists are unable to send the Curiosity rover to the location of the flowing H2O due to possible contamination of the water source with Earth-born microbes. The rover is not considered to be sterile, meaning that a terrestrial organism that hitched a ride with it to Mars could still be alive.
The Outer Space Treaty, a United Nations document originally written in 1967, established a set of regulations for space exploration mandating that investigations on other planets have to be conducted in a way to avoid the risk of contamination in so-called “special regions”.
Those regions include any area where liquid water appears to be present, Rich Zurek, a scientist on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team, confirmed in Reddit AMA session. These areas require “extra precautions… to prevent contamination by earth life,” Zurek explained.
In-depth RSL analysis may have to wait until 2018
That doesn’t necessarily mean Curiosity won’t be able to study the dark streaks, also known as recurring slope lineae (RSL), from afar, Andrew Coates of University College London said to The Guardian. The rover will be able to conduct measurements of the RSLs from a safe distance using its ChemCam instrument and lasers to analyze the composition.
Coates said that there will be “heated discussions” in the weeks ahead about how close Curiosity will be allowed to get to the RSLs, and that there was “increasing pressure from the science side” to permit such exploration. Ultimately, The Guardian said, the decision will be up to a Cospar, a group that oversees the planetary protection rules to prevent extraterrestrial contamination.
Landers that are searching for life, the UK newspaper explained, have to meet strict standards and be classified as category IVb. Those entering special regions, however, must be even cleaner and meet IVc standards. Curiosity was designed as a category IVb rover, and as such is currently not permitted to enter areas where water could be flowing.
NASA officials argue, however, that the intense radiation on the Red Planet, and the ultraviolet rays in particular, likely killed off any microbes carried into space on Curiosity. If so, it could be determined that the rover is clean enough to travel to the RSLs after all – but not all scientists are in agreement that the UV light would make the rover sterile. In fact, a recent ESA study reported that exposure to UV rays could actually make some microbes more of a problem.
If Curiosity cannot do the job, the next rover scheduled to make the journey to the Red Planet is the ExoMars mission, a joint project of the ESA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos set to launch in 2018, The Guardian said. Coates, who is leading the camera team on that rover, told reporters that “the planetary protection is being very carefully looked at” to ensure that it will be able to “make the best possible life-searching measurements in the regions it can get to.”
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Image credit: NASA
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