Right now all our missions to Mars are sterilized to protect Mars from any Earth life that could hitch a ride and confuse the searches. This report by the “Planetary Protection Independent Review Board” is a proposal to classify most of Mars as Category II similarly to the Moon. This would mean no need to sterilize rovers that we send to Mars.
This only makes a difference in the forwards direction. It ’s possible that the mission planners, space engineers and geologists at NASA don’t realize this, but how they classify Mars for the Outer Space Treaty makes no difference for sample returns. We are strongly protected by many environmental laws and laws to protect human health that we didn’t have at the time of Apollo. These laws don’t rely on the Outer Space Treaty for their legal basis, so how NASA categorizes Mars makes no difference to them. See the article by Margaret Race of the SETI institute
It’s important to get this right as there is no way to do a “do over”. It would be so sad to get to Mars, find life there, and then realize it was just life we brought ourselves.
As we’ll see new discoveries have opened up the possibility of native microbial life on Mars hidden from our orbital telescopes just centimeters below the dust. This is possible even in the exceedingly dry tropical areas where Curiosity is roving, as well as over large areas wherever salt contacts ice in the higher latitudes.
Some Mars colonization enthusiasts and space engineers will tell you that any life we find on Mars will be from Earth, but they have not persuaded the astrobiologists of this. The astrobiologists continue to design instruments to look for indigenous life there that don’t make any assumptions about its biochemistry or whether it is related to Earth life.
There’s a reason why astrobiologists say we have to be careful, in both directions. Legionnaires disease shows that an infection of biofilms can use the same methods to infect human lungs, seeing it as a warm biofilm - it is not adapted to humans. Some strains of it are adapting to our environments, spread by humans infected by it, but the same could happen with Martian life.
Astrobiologists say that though it is possible that Earth life could be mistified by an alien biochemistry, it’s also possible that it hasn’t evolved any resistance to it, never having encountered it before. Our lungs might offer no resistance, not even recognizing it as life as it munches away at them. Antibiotics would be likely to do nothing to stop life based on an alien biochemistry, as even Earth microbes evolve resistance by using alternatives to the particular cell processes targeted by the antibiotics (which after all don’t kill us).
The legislators would not ignore arguments such as these. There would be extensive public debate and Earth would be protected. Based on Margaret Race’s article, I attempt to work out a timeline here for return of an unsterilized sample which has not been studied in situ, and has potential to have microbial life of an unknown alien biochemistry in it. I don’t see how it can be done before 2040 even if there were no objections to delay the legal process: Why we are unlikely to return an unsterilized sample before 2040.
However if these proposals were adopted in the forwards direction, you could send what you like to these regions of Mars, tardigrades, extremophile blue green algae. The only requirement would be to document what you do. Humans could also land anywhere in those regions without taking any precautions, though returning to Earth would be another matter altogether if they could be returning alien biochemistry to us.
The report is here together with a cover letter from NASA recommending to their planetary protection officer that they implement the proposal:
This new report has few cites. Incongruously, its lead author is a planetary geologist. One of their main cites is a report from 2014 by Rummel et al which proposed the use of maps to divide Mars into special regions which need especially careful planetary protection measures:
They use it as a basis for their suggestion to classify much of Mars as the same as the Moon for planetary protection. Presumably they would use a map like the one in the 2014 review:
Map from the 2014 report. Purple is low in elevation, and grey is higher elevation. Red and blue lines delineating regions are approximately 50 km in width
In the text overlay I summarize the objection to this map in the 2015 review
Even before Rummel et al’s report was published, both NASA and ESA took steps to have it reviewed independently.
This 2015 review overturned several of the findings of the 2014 report, and in particular, it recommended against the use of maps [49] saying:
In general, the review committee contends that the use of maps to delineate regions with a lower or higher probability to host Special Regions is most useful if the maps are accompanied by cautionary remarks on their limitations. Maps … [of] surface features can only represent the current (and incomplete) state of knowledge for a specific time—knowledge that will certainly be subject to change or be updated as new information is obtained.
Yet this new NASA report doesn’t mention the 2015 review.
I don’t know the reason for this omission. They certainly should have looked at this 2015 review, and not just at the original 2014 report, before making this recommendation to NASA to map out most of Mars as category 2 like the Moon.
The 2015 report used the example of RSLs to explain why maps are not enough by themselves. These are seasonal streaks that form on sun facing Martian slopes. They appear in the Martian spring, grow and broaden through the summer and fade away in autumn. The dark features are not themselves damp and may be dust flows. However, they are associated with hydrated salts and they may also be linked with salty water (brines) in some form. Sadly the HiRISE instrument can only observe them in the early afternoon locally, the driest time for the Martian surface, because of its high inclination sun synchronous orbit. This makes it especially hard to know if there are any brines moving down these slopes.
Warm Season Flows on Slope in Newton Crater (animated)
Many of these are now known in the Martian “tropics”, especially on the slopes of the Valles Marineres. Their status is unknown, whether they could have habitats for Earth life or not. At present they are classified as
“As such they meet the criteria for Uncertain Regions, to be treated as Special Regions.” [a “Special region” is one that Earth microbes could potentially inhabit]
The 2015 review gives the example of the ExoMars Schiaparelli lander. All HiRISE images of the landing site were inspected for the possible presence of RSL's. [50]
As another example of this, 58 RSLs were found on Mount Sharp close to the Curiosity landing site.
Here are some of them:
Possible RSLs on mount Sharp not far from the Curiosity rover. These photos are taken at a similar time in the Martian year, they are less prominent in the earlier one in 09 March 2010 and more prominent with some new ones in the later image August 6 2012. Photo from supplementary information for Transient liquid water and water activity at Gale crater on Mars
Importantly, these were not discovered until after the Curiosity landing in 2012. See Slope activity in Gale crater, Mars (2015) and Nature article: Mars contamination fear could divert Curiosity rover
This shows that we mightn’t always be able to rule out potential uncertain regions that could be habitats at a landing site. They may be discovered later, after the landing itself.
More RSLs have been found in the Mawrth Vallis region, one of the two final candidates for ExoMars landing site
These results denote the plausible presence of transient liquid brines close to the previously proposed landing ellipse of the ExoMars rover, rendering this site particularly relevant to the search of life. Further investigations of Mawrth Vallis carried out at higher spatial and temporal resolutions are needed to …, to prevent probable biological contamination during rover operations, …
Discovery of recurring slope lineae candidates in Mawrth Vallis, Mars
ExoMars isn’t going to Mawrth Vallis, because they chose the other candidate Oxia Planum. I can’t find anything about RSLs in Oxia Planum, but how confident can we be that this doesn’t have RSLs or other potential habitats? Does non detection so far mean they aren’t there?
This new report also doesn’t mention the long running and vigorous debate on this topic, which started in two Nature articles in 2013 and has continued in Astrobiology journal through to 2019.
Both sides in this debate were in agreement that there is a significant possiblity that Earth microbes can contaminate Mars. They surely would not say that most of Mars is category II like the Moon. Rather, the argument is about whether we should reduce sterilization requirements for Mars in order to study these potential habitats quickly before human missions get there and make it impossible to study them in their pristine condition without Earth life.
Those arguing for relaxing planetary protection are:
Against
This debate is not mentioned. Nor does it mention the many new potential surface or near surface habitats that have been proposed / indirectly detected / theorized since 2008. We have had more of these than there have been years since 2008.
I’d like to cover a couple of these potential habitats to motivate this, then I’ll look at why it is so important to protect Mars from Earth life - is it really so important to make sure we don’t mix Earth life with Mars life before we canstudy it?
This is perhaps one of the most striking discoveries in recent years because of its implications for habitability of Mars. Nilton Renno found that liquid water can form very quickly on salt / ice interfaces. Within a few tens of minutes in Mars simulation experiments.
Erik Fischer, doctoral student at University of Michigan, sets up a Mars Atmospheric Chamber on June 18, 2014. These experiments showed that tiny "swimming pools for bacteria" can form readily on Mars wherever there is ice and salt in contact.
This is striking as it could open large areas of Mars up as potential sites for microhabitats that life could exploit. The professor says
https://youtu.be/iLWv9UGwjdE"If we have ice, and then the salt on top of the ice, in a few tens of minutes liquid water forms. Our measurements clearly indicate that. And it's really a proof that liquid water forms at the conditions of the Phoenix landing site when this salt is in contact with the ice.
"Based on the results of our experiment, we expect this soft ice that can liquefy perhaps a few days per year, perhaps a few hours a day, almost anywhere on Mars. So going from mid latitudes all the way to the polar regions.
" This is a small amount of liquid water. But for a bacteria, that would be a huge swimming pool - a little droplet of water is a huge amount of water for a bacteria. So, a small amount of water is enough for you to be able to create conditions for Mars to be habitable today'. And we believe this is possible in the shallow subsurface, and even the surface of the Mars polar region for a few hours per day during the spring."
(transcript from 1:48 onwards)
That's Nilton Renno, who lead the team of researchers. See also Martian salts must touch ice to make liquid water, study shows . He is a mainstream researcher in the field - a distinguished professor of atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences at Michigan University. For instance, amongst many honours, he received the 2013 NASA Group Achievement Award as member of the Curiosity Rover " for exceptional achievement defining the REMS scientific goals and requirements, developing the instrument suite and investigation, and operating REMS successfully on Mars" and has written many papers on topics such as possible habitats on the present day Mars surface.
This was a serendipitous discovery announced in April 2015. Liquid brines that form through deliquescing salts (perchlorates) - the salts take in water from the atmosphere (same principle as the salts you use to keep equipment dry).
They noticed that when Curiosity drives over sand dunes, then the air above them is drier than it is normally. When it leaves the sandy areas the humidity increases.
Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover
It’s temperature and humidity sensors are located on these booms on the rover’s mast
This shows that something in the sand dunes is taking up water vapour from the air, and rather a lot of it too. They calculated that the perchlorates in the sand must take up so much water at night that the liquid brines would be habitable, except that they are too cold for Earth life. This shows how it works:
As the day progresses the brines warm up but any brines close to the surface (in the top five centimeters or so) would dry out, and become too salty for Earth life. That's for any water in the top five centimeters or so. They suggest that it could have permanently hydrated brines below about 15 centimeters below the surface, and at that depth, the liquid would never get warm enough for metabolic activity for Earth microbes, never mind replication.
Top temperatures in summer at 15 cms depth would be around -40 °C (I'm reading this off their figure 2a, grey shows the temperature range 15 cm below the surface).
The authors of the paper concluded that the conditions in the Curiosity region were probably beyond the habitability range for replication and metabolism of known terrestrial micro-organisms.
For a summary see "Evidence of liquid water found on Mars (BBC)" and for the article in Nature "Transient liquid water and water activity at Gale crater on Mars" (abstract, the paper is behind a paywall, but you can read it via the link in the BBC article through Springer Nature Sharedit).
"Gale Crater is one of the least likely places on Mars to have conditions for brines to form, compared to sites at higher latitudes or with more shading. So if brines can exist there, that strengthens the case they could form and persist even longer at many other locations, perhaps enough to explain RSL activity,"
Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen
Does this really mean that the brines are sterile though - for either Mars or Earth life?
Nilton Renno, who is an expert on Mars surface conditions suggests that Earth microbes may still be able to exploit this liquid brine layer through biofilms::
"Life as we know it needs liquid water to survive. While the new study interprets Curiosity's results to show that microorganisms from Earth would not be able to survive and replicate in the subsurface of Mars, Rennó sees the findings as inconclusive. He points to biofilms—colonies of tiny organisms that can make their own microenvironment."
The 2015 review makes a similar point about the ability of multi-species microbial communities to alter dispersed small-scale habitats.
Cells in biofilms are embedded in a matrix of externally produced substances (such as polysaccharides, proteins, lipids and DNA) and adjust environmental parameters to make them more habitable[45]. There are many examples of small-scale and even microscale communities on Earth including biofilms only a few cells thick. Microbes can propagate in these biofilms despite adverse and extreme surrounding conditions.
NOTE ON FOOTNOTES: the footnotes here link to my Astrobiology Encyclopedia. This has corrected and extended versions of Wikipedia articles on the same topic, which have many mistakes and omissions (for instance, Wikipedia doesn’t mention the 2015 review).
I don’t know if Nilton Renno meant a martian biofilm or one for Earth life.
However it could be both. Martian life would surely be adjusted to live at the lowest temperatures on Mars. It could do that using chaotropic agents. Earth life may be able to use these too. 2014 report mentions these:
3.1.3. Chaotropic substances.Numerous types of com-pounds increase the flexibility of molecules, destabilizingand/or fluidizing them
Mars has abundant chaotropic agents
Chaotropes such as MgCl2, CaCl2, FeCl3, FeCl2, FeCl, LiCl, perchlorate, and perchlorate salts are, collectively, abundant in the regolith of Mars.
These would permit faster metabolic processes at lower temperatures.
The 2014 report has a finding
Finding 3-3: Chaotropic compounds can lower thetemperature limit for cell division below that observed intheir absence. There exists the possibility that chaotropic substances could decrease the lower temperature limit for cell division of some microbes to below-18°C (255 K), but such a result has not been published.
I haven’t found much research on the topic since then. Here are a couple of relevant papers but these are preliminary results:
If you know of more on this topic do say.
If it is possible for life to evolve to live in these habitats, then conditions on Mars would seem to be optimal to drive such evolution
Surely there is a possibility here that martian biofilms have evolved to take advantage of these brines.
If they have done so they would likely trap the water at night at those low temperatures below - 40 C and then retain it in the films t hrough to daytime as the brines warm up to temperatures conducive to Earth life.
Then let’s look briefly at the RSLs, top candidate for many astrobiologists.
WHAT ARE THESE RECURRING SLOPE LINEAE (RSLS)?
Many dark streaks form seasonally on Mars. Most of these are thought to be due to dry ice and wind effects. This image shows an example, probably the result of avalanche slides and not thought to have anything to do with water:
Slope Streaks in Acheron Fossae on Mars - these streaks are thought to be possibly due to avalanches of dark sand flowing down the slope
However a few of the streaks form in conditions that rule out all the usual mechanisms. These are the Warm Seasonal Flows, also known as Recurrent Slope Lineae.[100]
The leading hypotheses for these is that they are correlated in some way with the seasonal presence of liquid water - probably salty brines.
A new paper shows that the features are consistent with dust cascades, but what hasn’t been reported so much are the many difficulties with this explanation which suggest they are not yet fully understood and may still contain substantial amounts of brines. I wrote a summary of this research for a draft astrobiology article I’m working on myself (work in progress) (cites here take you to my version of the article in google docs)
The Recurring Slope Lineae (RSL’s) remain a leading candidate for brines that could be habitable, although there is considerable debate in the literature about the amount of brines present and whether they may be habitable. In planetary protection discussions since they may be the result of aqueous processes they are treated as “an Uncertain Region that is to be treated as a Special Region until proven” (Rettberg et al, 2016).
A study of RSLs in Eos Chasma shows that the features are consistent with dust cascades, since they terminate at slopes matching the stopping angle for granular flows of cohesionless dust, and they also ruled out formation of substantial quantities of crust‐forming evaporitic salt deposits, though the hydrated salts and seasonal nature continue to suggest some role for water in their formation (Dundas et al, 2017).
Difficulties with the dust explanation include the rapid fading away of the streaks at the end of the season, instead of the more usual decades, and a lack of an explanation of how the dust is resupplied year after year. Resupply also remains a major question for the models involving substantial amounts of liquid brines (Stillman quoted in David, 2017). A study of RSLs in the Valles Marineres finds that they seem to traverse bedrock rather than the regolith of other RSLs, and that if water is involved in their formation, then substantial amounts must be needed to sustain lengthening throughout the season (Stillman et al, 2017).
This is my preprint of it registered with the Open Science Foundation:
Potential Severe Effects of a Biosphere Collision and Planetary Protection Implications
It’s easy to find life if we bring it there ourselves.
The Chicxulub impactor did send material from a shallow tropical ocean to Mars 66 million years ago, but it would be hard for a microbe to withstand the shock of impact, fireball of ejection from our atmosphere, ionizing radiation, cold and vacuum of space, and then to find a home on present day dry and dusty Mars congenial to it.
But if there is, it’s most likely transferred billions of years ago when Mars had seas and big asteroids tens to hundreds of kilometers in diameter hit Earth able to punch a hole in our atmosphere and send rocks all the way to Mars with relatively little by way of shock or atmospheric heating.
Cassie Conley, former planetary protection officer for Mars puts it like this:
https://youtu.be/qk-Ycp5llEI33 seconds into this video “So we have to do all of our search for life activities, we have to look for the Mars organisms, without the background, without the noise of having released Earth organisms into the Mars environment.”
Full quote:
The idea of bringing microbes to Mars, in order to sort of test whether Mars could be a habitat, whether we could terraform Mars, whether it could be a habitat for Earth organisms -- that's something we might do eventually. If the international community decides it's the right thing to do, we can certainly do it. It's just that as we go about the process of exploring Mars, we don't want to screw up the things we want to do first by doing things that then we can't take back afterwards.
We can't do a do-over on releasing organisms in the Mars environment. Once they're there they will be there. So we have to do all of our search for life activities, we have to look for the Mars organisms without the background, without the noise of having released Earth organisms into the Mars environment. This is why we are very careful when we clean robotic spacecraft, because we really want to understand what's there at Mars and not see the stuff we brought with us by accident.
Prestige or dishonour, first footsteps on Mars
[will expand with discussion of each of the possible future news stories]
First Astronauts on Mars
The first astronauts to land on Mars plant flags in the soil
This would be so exciting for enthusiasts - the first astronaut on the red planet. We all cheer.
If it was an international expedition, as it would likely be because of the expense, I can imagine they might bring the “Flag of Earth” along with the other flags to show they come for all mankind.
Title: Mars Astronauts find Life!
Today Paul Maldonado, the astrobiology mission specialist, announced that he had found clear signs of life on Mars. The life was found in a Recurrent Slope Linea close to their base camp.
(Photo is actually of a slope with RSLs from this paper)
Wonderful. What we have been looking for all this time. Also though I don’t say it in this short article - they might well gene sequence it, find it has the same genetic code as DNA, and announce that it doesn’t match any known Earth microbe.
This would be so exciting - except perhaps for some doubts amongst knowledgeable astrobiologists who would be somewhat dreading what comes next, after all this is what that long running debate in Astrobiology journal from 2013 to 2019 was all about.
If this happens and some of the astrobiologists seem a little subdued and not as excited as you’d think, this would be the reason:
Title: Big Disappointment - “Mars Life” was from Earth!
On close examination the life turns out to be a salt loving microbe that sneaked in on the spaceship with the astronauts themselves. It must have got blown in the dust storm that enveloped the camp soon after they got to Mars.
Oh how sad. It was just an Earth microbe that snuck along for the ride as a hijacker.
It would be easier to make this mistake than you’d think. Our spacecraft are likely to have microbes that can survive on Mars. Spacecraft assembly rooms have a wide range of extremophile species.
The microbes carried by humans can have hidden extremophile capabilities - because microbes do not lose their capabilities, usually, when they move to a different environment. Some are polyextremophiles able to live in a variety of extreme environments as well as in much more ordinary ones (for humans).
A typical human has 100 trillion microbes in 10,000 species - and the species mix varies from one person to another. We have those extremophiles on our skins, in our clothes, for instance a recent study of microbial populations of human belly buttons found a couple of species able to thrive in extreme cold and extreme heat.
About half the species in our gut, even today, in 2019, are likely to be unknown to science. They can’t be cultivated yet outside of the human gut, and not for lack of trying. See Uncovering uncultivated microbes in the human gut and paper New insights from uncultivated genomes of the global human gut microbiome
It’s well possible that we bring along microbes that can survive on Mars and that we haven’t yet cultivated or sequenced. It depends how warm the habitat is - that’s the upside. Earth microbes do continue to grow even at very low temperatures but they get slower and slower, eventually reproducing every century and possibly at colder temperatures on timescales of millennia.
So, what about the dust? This is another point the 2015 review brought up that they felt wasn’t covered adequately in the 2024 report, terrestrial contamination blown in the Martian dust.
They agreed with the 2014 report that life would be strongly sterilized by the UV radiation - but some microbes are able to withstand it for up to several hours of direct martian sunlight. Also the life can form cell chains, clumps or aggregates and the cells in the interior of those aggregates would be protected.
The review said that research so far (as of 2015) was not sufficient to answer the question. The possibility of microbial contamination spread in the dust could be confirmed or rejected in terrestrial Mars simulation chambers.[44]
Well, that confirmation or rejection hasn’t happened yet as far as I know. On going research but it is not easy to duplicate the conditions of a Martian dust storm in a laboratory - and then - there are many unknowns about the dust too.
The dust would have perchlorates in it, but though hazardous to human thyroid glands, some microbes that use them as food and they are less reactive at low temperatures.
The UV light can convert these perchlorates to the more toxic chlorites and hypochlorites, but biofilms and hardy spores can resist those too, as might extremophiles. Also, less than a mm of dust can block out the UV light.
I go into that in this section of my preprint, just summarizing current research again:
UV tolerance by extremophiles and transport of spores in martian dust storms
The martian dust is as fine as cigarette dust and wherever the astronauts walk or their rovers travel they would kick it up. The Apollo astronauts got filthy with dust - well - Mars astronauts would be much dustier. The lunar rover threw up dust wherever it went but it just arced over in parabolas back to the ground again in the lunar vacuum. A Martian rover would create clouds of fine dust that would just hang in the air like the dust from a dust storm which takes a long time to settle.
Then the ground is typically covered in boulders, and the shadows of those boulders are protected from UV light, also the astronauts could just trample the spores into their footprints.
Mars has frequent dust storms and sometimes they go global. The Mariner 3 probe flew past Mars during a global dust storm. These typically start in the southern hemisphere, during the southern spring or summer, encircle the planet in southern latitudes then extend north across the equator and can cover much of the planet. (see page 129 of this article) (though unusually the 2018 one started in the northern hemisphere).
The dust travels hundreds of kilometers a day and can circle the entire planet in a week. The 2018 duststorm, for instance, grew all the way to a planet encircling duststorm in two weeks
So the microbes from a human base could end up anywhere on Mars.
It’s a rather similar situation in the McMurdo cold dry valleys in Antarctica (kept dry by the strong winds blowing off the continent).
The researchers there are interested in studying microbial communities - and rather like for Mars, they want to study the indigenous microbes rather than the ones they bring along themselves. The researchers stay within a fixed area around the camp in order to limit their impact, in a "corral" system.
This shows a typical Antarctic dry valley field camp. It's perhaps the closest biological analogy we have to a Mars base
They give as a a typical example, a corral that's 50 meters square.
After a ten day camp restricted to those 50 square meters, they will leave an estimated sixty billion microbes in the soil.
Assuming those sixty billion microbes are evenly mixed into the top one cm of the site, then that makes it around a hundred thousand microbes in each cubic centimeter, which is between 0.1% and 10% of the natural population of microbes in those sites. Calculations from page 4 of this paper: Non-indigenous microorganisms in the Antarctic: Assessing the risks
So there will be lots of microbes in the dust around a human camp on Mars. It would surely not be possible to keep them within the habitats - spacesuits leak air all the time for instance, so that they can move their arms. They would be taking equipment in and out of the habitat too.
While if a spaceship crashes like the Challenger - always a risk with especially the way Elon Musk plans to land there with supersonic retropropulsion which needs it to fly close to the ground. Possibly so low it has to fly below the walls of the Valles Marineres to get enough air resistance to stop. See Supersonic retropropulsion - or huge parachutes
The astrobiologists when they discuss this just assume that a human base will leak microbes and I haven’t seen any suggestion that there is any way to stop this.
Title: Native Mars Life Found - But Doomed to Extinction
The astronauts have found native life in the RSL. It contains RNA and ribozymes, but no DNA, ribosomes, or proteins, and is thought to be an “RNA world lifeform” that is more primitive than Earth life. It is no match for Earth life, which is expected to make it extinct.
Photo is of nanobes from "New life form may be a great find of the century" (1999), at one time thought to be relic RNA world life here on Earth)
This is based on the idea of a e Shadow Biosphere which was quite a popular idea a few years back. It was a possible explanation of those nanobe structures.
They had no success finding any RNA world life on Earth. But could it exist on Mars? Perhaps its there alongside Earth life, or perhaps it’s the only life there.
We have no idea what we’ll find on Mars and you can argue either way. Perhaps it has continued to evolve at a similar pace to Earth life or faster, and is as advanced as Earth life or more so. Or perhaps it has hardly evolved at all, because of the small population sizes and harsh c
I made it RNA world life for the purposes of the story but it could be any form of early life that predates the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA).
It’s not implausibe for Martian life. This was one of the ideas for the structures in ALH84001, that they might be these RNA world cells. It was originally suggested by the fourth panel in Size Limits of Very Small Microorganisms (1999) - which was convened shortly after the martian life announcements. Although other possible explanations are known, enough so that those structures can’t be claimed as a “discovery of life”, the research hasn't disproved it either, they are just alternative explanations.
The jury is still out on whether the structures in ALH84001 were the result of life or not. In "Towards a Theory of Life" in the book "Frontiers of Astrobiology" (2012, CUP) by Steven A. Benner (notable as the first person to synthesize a gene) and Paul Davies, the authors talk about RNA world cells as a possible explanation of the structures. Early life based on those ideas could have had cells as small as 50 nm across.
"Why should proteins be universally necessary components of life? Could it be that Martian life has no proteins?
... Life forms in the putative RNA world (by definition) survived without encoded proteins and the ribosomes needed to assemble them. ... If those structures represent a trace of an ancient RNA world on Mars, they would not need to be large enough to accommodate ribosomes. The shapes in meteorite ALH84001 just might be fossil organisms from a Martian "RNA world".
The cells could be far smaller if they use ribozymes, made up of RNA fragments instead of the more complex ribosomes that mix protein with RNA. They could also have only single strand RNA based replication and none of the complex translation machinery to translate double strand DNA into RNA (including unzipping the DNA, and zipping it up etc).
This would make the cells far simpler and smaller than for modern life. Complex in what they do, in their capabilities - they would surely have dormant states to survive dessication, and ways to combat the ionizing radiation, temperature changes etc, but perhaps that is all done with RNA.
Whatever the earliest forms of life were, it’s impossible that the complexity of modern life could arise in one go, with its thousands of different chemicals needed for even the minimum size of cell. Some simpler form must have arisen first, and perhaps is still there on Mars.
Whether those are fossils of life or not, as Harry McSween put it in an early paper in 1997
"this controversy continues to help define strategies and sharpen tools that will be required for a Mars exploration program focused on the search for life.
So I am supposing that they do find RNA world life. Though it doesn’t say, probably they found the RNA world life by drilling below the surface to a layer not contaminated by Earth life yet.
This early life could be very vulnerable.
To quote from my own biosphere collisions preprint again (summarizing existing research):
According to one idea, the earliest life, all the way through to the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), might have been simple “modifiable cells” capable of taking up “naked” genetic material and evolving through lateral transfer, by Lamarckian rather than Darwinian evolution (Woese, 2002) (Brown, 2003) (Jheeta, 2013).
Such life might, though primitive, yet be adapted to Mars. It may be the most perfectly adapted RNA world “modifiable cells” imaginable, with many specialist enzymes and other adaptations to help it to function in its extreme environment. Yet, such life might have little by way of defences against modern Earth microbes. Evolving through massively parallel Lamarckian evolution, easy and fast uptake of capabilities from its neighbours is the priority.
Although cells themselves would not yet be in competition with each other, the genomes within them would be. These might evolve some degree of genomic protection, in small vesicles. As described by Koonin:
"Conceivably, such primitive units of evolution could have been represented by small, virus-like replicons that populated abiogenic lipid vesicles or inorganic compartments and were subject to selection for replication efficiency" (Koonin, 2014)
If so, they eventually developed the complexity of a cell and at that point the first steps in true Darwinian evolution would have begun. However, on Earth, this first stage may not have happened until as late as 3.5 - 3.8 billion years ago (Doolittle, 2000). If so, our Earth could have had several hundred million years of evolution before the transition to Darwinian evolution.
Potential Severe Effects of a Biosphere Collision and Planetary Protection Implications
That then would take us to the end of the Noachian period on Mars, when it still had abundant water and seas.
Perhaps what we have there are still replicons in undistinguished cells that share their genetic material with each other readily. You can imagine such simple life being vulnerable to our life. Something must have made it extinct on Earth and if whatever did that hasn’t got to Mars yet, we could easily be the vehicle that brings it to Mars, whether predation or competition with cells with a more efficient metabolism, or bacteriophages (if sufficiently related) or whatever it is.
Even if there is Earth life there, the early life might be there too in a shadow biosphere,(Cleland, 2007),
Also there’s another possiblity, based on Charles Cockell's work on “Trajectories of martian habitability” (Cockell, 2014).
Mars at the moment is reasonably habitable - at times it’s been more so, but at times in the past less so. Maybe the surface life gets a reset from time to time when it goes extinct (perhaps with other life existing deep down all the way through).
If so, perhaps life has evolved again, starting a few tens of millions of years ago, It could then be at a very early stage of evolution.
From my preprint again:
If we are clumsy, could this invasion of Earth life continue rapidly to the extent that before we have the opportunity to study it thoroughly, or learn how to cultivate it, nothing remains of the native life of Mars, Europa or Enceladus, even in a shadow biosphere? Or if anything remains, only as capabilities transferred from the native life into Earth microbes?
Potential Severe Effects of a Biosphere Collision and Planetary Protection Implications
Title: Astronauts Regret Making Mars Life Extinct
Experts say that it is too late to do anything about the introduced Earth life on Mars since the dust storms will spread their spores, and dormant microbes, throughout the planet. The astronauts say that they regret making the native Mars life extinct. Can we do anything to protect at least some of the RNA world life on Mars? So far there has been no success in getting it to replicate in the laboratory.
(Photograph is Hubble's photograph of a Global Mars dust storm from 2001 )
Though the martian life is perfectly adapted to Mars, it doesn’t mean it is going to be easy to grow in the laboratory. After all our best studied microbiomes such as the human gut still have many uncultivated microbes and that’s after decades of trying.
The unique physical and chemical conditions on the Mars surface might be hard to replicate in the laboratory and the microbes that were collected might depend on others in a community, maybe they didn’t manage to collect the pioneer microbes able to colonize a habitat initially (or maybe that is a slow process that we can’t replicate easily in the lab).
They might well die on the journey back to Earth as the astronauts struggle to keep them alive but fail, especially if it is an early pre-LUCA form of life with no defences against Earth life. Then maybe with the next visit to Mars that early life can’t be found any more and is now extinct. It might have been a last relict of an ancient biosphere.
Few science fiction authors have tackled the theme of forward contamination of other parts of our solar system by Earth microbes, but there's one poignant sad story, by Arthur C. Clarke, "Before Eden", in Amazing Stories, June 1961. Back then, though they knew Venus was hot, scientists thought it was still possible that Venus could have water on its surface, perhaps at the top of its mountains.
One of the covers for Arthur C. Clarke's "Before Eden" -a poignant sad story about forward contamination of Venus, published in 1961 at a time when surface life there was still a remote scientific possibility. You can hear the complete story read as an audio book here.
These adventurers are exploring a completely dry Venus, or so they think. Up to then (in the story), everyone thought Venus had no water, and was sterile of life. That was a natural thought, because the temperatures they encountered were always above the boiling point of water. But the heroes of the story are stranded near the not quite so hot South pole, and find mountainous cliffs there. On those mountains they find a dried up waterfall - and then - a lake!
“Yet for all this, it was a miracle—the first free water that men had ever found on Venus. Hutchins was already on his knees, almost in an attitude of prayer. But he was only collecting drops of the precious liquid to examine through his pocket microscope.... He sealed a test tube and placed it in his collecting bag, as tenderly as any prospector who had just found a nugget laced with gold. It might be – it probably was – nothing more than plain water. But it might also be a universe of unknown, living creatures on the first stage of their billion-year journey to intelligence....”
“...What they were watching was a dark tide, a crawling carpet, sweeping slowly but inexorably toward them over the top of the ridge. The moment of sheer, unreasoning panic lasted, mercifully, no more than a few seconds. Garfield’s first terror began to fade as soon as he recognised its cause....”
“… But whatever this tide might be, it was moving too slowly to be a real danger, unless it cut off their line of retreat. Hutchins was staring at it intently through their only pair of binoculars; he was the biologist, and he was holding his ground. No point in making a fool of myself, thought Jerry, by running like a scalded cat, if it isn’t necessary. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ he said at last, when the moving carpet was only a hundred yards away and Hutchins had not uttered a word or stirred a muscle. ‘What is it?’ Hutchins slowly unfroze, like a statue coming to life. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten all about you. It’s a plant, of course. At least, I suppose we’d better call it that.’ ‘But it’s moving! ’ ‘Why should that surprise you? So do terrestrial plants. Ever seen speeded-up movies of ivy in action?’ ‘That still stays in one place – it doesn’t crawl all over the landscape.’ ”
“‘Then what about the plankton plants of the sea? They can swim when they have to.’ Jerry gave up; in any case, the approaching wonder had robbed him of words... ”“... ‘Let’s see how it reacts to light,’ said Hutchins. He switched on his chest lamp, and the green auroral glow was instantly banished by the flood of pure white radiance. Until Man had come to this planet, no white light had ever shone upon the surface of Venus, even by day. As in the seas of Earth, there was only a green twilight, deepening slowly to utter darkness. The transformation was so stunning that neither man could check a cry of astonishment. Gone in a flash was the deep, sombre black of the thickpiled velvet carpet at their feet. Instead, as far as their lights carried, lay a blazing pattern of glorious, vivid reds, laced with streaks of gold. No Persian prince could ever have commanded so opulent a tapestry from his weavers, yet this was the accidental product of biological forces. Indeed, until they had switched on their floods, these superb colours had not even existed, and they would vanish once more when the alien light of Earth ceased to conjure them into being...”
“...For the first time, as they relaxed inside their tiny plastic hemisphere, the true wonder and importance of the discovery forced itself upon their minds. This world around them was no longer the same; Venus was no longer dead – it had joined Earth and Mars. For life called to life, across the gulfs of space. Everything that grew or moved upon the face of any planet was a portent, a promise that Man was not alone in this universe of blazing suns and swirling nebulae. If as yet he had found no companions with whom he could speak, that was only to be expected, for the lightyears and the ages still stretched before him, waiting to be explored. Meanwhile, he must guard and cherish the life he found, whether it be upon Earth or Mars or Venus. So Graham Hutchins, the happiest biologist in the solar system, told himself as he helped Garfield collect their refuse and seal it into a plastic disposal bag. When they deflated the tent and started on the homeward journey, there was no sign of the creature they had been examining. That was just as well; they might have been tempted to linger for more experiments, and already it was getting uncomfortably close to their deadline. No matter; in a few months they would be back with a team of assistants, far more adequately equipped and with the eyes of the world upon them. Evolution had laboured for a billion years to make this meeting possible; it could wait a little longer.”
“...For a while nothing moved in the greenly glimmering, fog-bound landscape; it was deserted by man and crimson carpet alike. Then, flowing over the wind-carved hills, the creature reappeared. Or perhaps it was another of the same strange species; no one would ever know. It flowed past the little cairn of stones where Hutchins and Garfield had buried their wastes. And then it stopped. It was not puzzled, for it had no mind. But the chemical urges that drove it relentlessly over the polar plateau were crying: Here, here! Somewhere close at hand was the most precious of all the foods it needed – phosphorous, the element without which the spark of life could never ignite...”
" ... And then it feasted, on food more concentrated than any it had ever known. It absorbed the carbohydrates and the proteins and the phosphates, the nicotine from the cigarette ends, the cellulose from the paper cups and spoons. All these it broke down and assimilated into its strange body, without difficulty and without harm. Likewise it absorbed a whole microcosm of living creatures—the bacteria and viruses which, on an older planet, had evolved into a thousand deadly strains. Though only a very few could survive in this heat and this atmosphere, they were sufficient. As the carpet crawled back to the lake, it carried contagion to all its world. Even as the Morning Star set its course for her distant home, Venus was dying. The films and photographs and specimens that Hutchins was carrying in triumph were more precious even than he knew. They were the only record that would ever exist of life’s third attempt to gain a foothold in the solar system. Beneath the clouds of Venus, the story of Creation was ended.”
How sad it would be if future explorers on Mars get glimpses of early forms of life on Mars, and then they go extinct soon after they are discovered. Or indeed, even before, maybe they are extinct before anyone finds them. It would be great to be able to say that humans on Mars will cause no problems. It's what most of us want to be true, and we love to read science fiction stories, and watch movies, based on this idea. If you say this, you are bound to be popular with space colonization enthusiasts and science fiction geeks, and your work will probably get widely shared.
But our actions on Mars will have real world consequences, and won't just lead to popular acclaim and book or movie sequels. We don't get to write the script for what happens next. We need to take a careful and thorough look at what might actually happen before we act. Let's look beyond the widely shared optimistic stories reassuring us that nothing can go wrong.
The last few paras here are from my:
In:
I don’t think Elon Musk would want to do this, or Robert Zubrin, or most space colonization enthusiasts, and for sure NASA don’t. The main risk here is that someone in private space, makes an executive decision that he is not risking extinction of Martian life, or NASA does, and makes the wrong call.
That’s especially concerning because it seems from the way this report was handled that the decision may devolve to planetary geologists and colonization enthusiasts rather than to astrobiologists. However an astrobiologist might also make the wrong decision here, out of enthusiasm for space settlement and space colonization. We should base such decisions on the full range of views of astrobiologists and not just those that make the decision we like.
So then we get the last of this series of poignant sad news stories from this (hopefully alternate) future where the first astronauts to land on Mars make native Martian life extinct.
The Lascaux cave painting photo is by Prof Saxx.
I made these “Future Possible News” stories with this online spoof newspaper generator. I invented the name of the astrobiology mission specialist using this online fake name generator.
I go into this analogy in my Touch Mars? book.
Quoting from the section: “Touching Mars”
We love to touch things. If you put a sculpture in an art gallery and say "please touch", you can guarantee it, that both children and adults will do so. So it's natural that we want to touch Mars too, and other planets, if we can. But there are plenty of things we can't touch on Earth. Not just sculptures and works of art in art galleries. The Lascaux cave paintings for one,
Photograph of the Lascaux paintings by Prof Saxx.
Many of us would love to touch these paintings, as the original painters did, and feel the texture of the rock they are painted over. But not only are we not permitted to touch them - we have to take care even about going into caves like these at all. The warmth, humidity and carbon dioxide from our breath have taken their toll. Fungi and black mold are attacking the ancient cave paintings.
The purple markings in this photograph show some of the damage we've caused, not directly, but through our breath and in other ways, unintentionally.
The cave was found by four children, out with their dog in the 1940s after a tree blew down exposing a hole in the ground. It was opened to the public immediately after WWII, when the owners of the land, the La Rochefoucauld family, enlarged the entrance, added steps and replaced the sediment that covered the cave floor with concrete. This venture was wildly successful, with 1,500 visitors a day, but the humidity, carbon dioxide and warmth of all the visitors took their toll. This lead to microbes, fungi and black mold colonizing the cave. They eventually closed down the cave and made a copy of it for the visitors, known as Lascaux II, recreated using the same techniques and pigments, as best they could . Even though the original cave has been closed for some time now, to all except occasional specialists, it is already too late to restore it back completely to its original condition.
Scientists' attempts to fix the many issues arising from human visitors have often made things worse,with one more misstep after another. For instance, after a white fungus spread over the floor and up the walls, the scientists took great care to photograph every single painting in detail, to keep track of the damage. It seemed an eminently sensible thing to do. What they didn't realize is that the bright lights they needed for their photographs were damaging the cave paintings, by encouraging the growth of a black mold. This is now a major issue there with black spots spreading over the paintings. For details see the Washington Post article: Debate Over Moldy Cave Art Is a Tale of Human Missteps. In a recent conference, climatologists said that it is possible to restore the original environmental conditions of the cave. But the microbiologists said that it is not possible to restore the pre year 2000 microbial conditions. They say that the only way forward is to just accept that we can't do anything about the new species of microbes we've brought there. Instead, we have to try to find a new equilibrium. Trying to destroy the new invasive microbes will only make things worse.
SO WHAT DO WE DO?
Well first, this scenario I think is much further into the future than NASA or Elon Musk seem to think.
The retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, former commander of the ISS, interviewed by New Scientist, put it like this in their article "We should live on the moon before a trip to Mars"
"I think ultimately we’ll be living on the moon for a generation before we get to Mars. If the world and the moon were threatened and the only way to preserve our species was to launch from Earth, we could go to Mars with yesterday’s technology, but we would probably kill just about everybody on the way."
"It’s as if you and I were in Paris, paddling around in the Seine in little canoes saying, 'We’ve got boats, we’ve got paddles, let’s go to Australia!' Australia? We can barely cross the English Channel. We’re sort of in that boat in space exploration right now. A journey to Mars is conceivable but it’s still a lot further away than most people think."
By a generation I take him to mean that the babies being born today would be the young astronauts that could go to Mars orbit - probably some time in the 2040s.
First I don’t think Musk or anyone else will have these large Starships flying for a few years yet. Elon time as they call it. Suppose he has them flying to the Moon by 2025.
Well - to head off to Mars at that point is like Chris Hadfield’s
'We’ve got boats, we’ve got paddles, let’s go to Australia!'
Okay they fly, they have life support - but - suppose as your mission leaves Earth, it has an explosion as for Apollo 13, or a chemical release, or fire, or a failure of the life support, or breach of the hull.
If this was a nuclear sub, say, you could have some hope of getting to the surface and being rescued. But there is no oxygen around for millions of miles, no water, just the vacuum of space. No med vac, no dinghies. We simply don’t have any situation like that on Earth where people are so isolated not just from support from other humans, but from any nature services or resources or habitability.
If the enthusiasts think they are ready to go to Mars, well, let’s do a mission to the far side of the Moon. Study it from the L2 position via telepresence. Simulate the time delay for radio signals to Earth. Leave a crew there for two years with no resupply from Earth and not permitted to return except in an emergency.
If they can do that, then they may be ready to do a Mars flyby in an amarda of three for safety, maybe three spaceships with triply redundant everything. However most likely something goes wrong. I’d be surprised if we are ready to go to Mars in less than a decade after the first landings on the Moon by this Starship.
ANY HUMANS TO MARS WOULD BE ONE WAY UNLESS WE KNOW MARS IS SAFE
Even if martian life was harmless to humans, if it spread through Earth’s biospheres and most microbiomes became a mix of Earth and martian microbes, many or all higher life on Earth might not be adapted to coexist with these microbiomes with their alien chemistries (for instance their cells might well incorporate perchlorates instead of salts and chemical signals and toxins from an alien biochemistry). Toxic algal blooms in the Great Lakes kill dogs and cows that eat them, so for sure, alien life could harm us if it spread through our ecosystems.
I don’t see humans that go to Mars returning to Earth before 2040 or until we understand the Martian biochemistry in situ.
Hopefully also space colonization enthusiasts can come to see that these planetary protection requirements are not just pointless paperwork. It may seem like just a form of rubberstamping but it’s not.
There is a distinct possibility that we find life on Mars that is hazardous to humans, and it is because of this possiblity that we are required to check it is safe before returning any to Earth. In the forwards direction, the enthusiasts for humans on Mars should also care about making sure that it is a safe place for humans to land and that they know what precautions to take if a human landing is biologically compatible with whatever is on Mars.
This may seem bad news to potential colonization enthusiasts. But if we can protect Mars and it has interesting indigenous life this would be a huge incentive to send humans there, to study it from orbit. They could explore the surface via telepresence far more thoroughly and rapidly than robots on the surface.
This approach is safe, practical, seems likely to do most science return for the least cost and also is the only reasonably sure way to protect both any native Martian life and the environment of Earth. It was highlighted in the NASA Telerobotics symposium for its planetary protection credentials, and as a fast effective way to do the science.
Telerobotics Could Help Humanity Explore Space Credit NASA / GSFC. "Safely tucked inside orbiting habitat, space explorers use telepresence to operate machinery on Mars, even lobbing a sample of the Red Planet to the outpost for detailed study." - I've added the HERRO image of a tele-operated Centaur as an insert.
The astrobiologists say we need to look for life in situ first, so that we can distinguish the organics that fall on Mars from space from any indigenous abiotic organics, and the probably faint and scattered traces from indigenous past or present day life. See How do we search for life from orbit? - The amazing advances in the technology for In situ biosignature detection instruments. Geological samples could be sterilized on the surface, perhaps with a portable gamma ray source, equivalent to a few million years of surface ionizing radiation (which would still preserve some of the organics, similarly to the organics in Martian meteorites).. As for biologically interesting samples, they could be returned to separate telerobotic facilities around Mars or Earth, or back to the habitat itself if by then they know enough to be sure that it is okay for humans and Earth to enter the chain of contact.
Is This Why We Haven't Found Life On Mars Yet? Value Of Actually Looking
However
Currently the whole of Mars is classified as category IV
“…where there is a significant chance that contamination carried by a spacecraft could jeopardize future exploration.” We define “significant chance” as “the presence of niches (places where terrestrial microorganisms could proliferate) and the likelihood of transfer to those places.”
However it is then subdivided into categories IVa, b and c, where IVc is a region where terrestrial organisms are likely to propagate, or interpreted to have a high potential for existence of extant Martian life forms.
A Viking lander being prepared for dry heat sterilization – this remains the "Gold standard"[1] of present-day planetary protection. It was heated for 30 hours at 112 C.
A similar level of sterilization is currently needed for the “special regions”. The rest of Mars is considered to have conditions so harsh that only the pre-sterilization stage of Viking, cleaning the spacecraft with alcohol wipes in a spacecraft assembly clean room.
IVa is for regions of Mars like Gale Crater where Curiosity landed, where the local conditions are so harsh that they are thought to be equivalent in effect to the 30 hours of heat sterilization of Viking. Curiosity was only required to be sterilized to the pre-sterilization levels of the Viking lander, with the Mars surface conditions doing the rest. IVb is for missions that search for life, where part or all of it might need to be sterilized even if it is not a special region (e.g. if it is going to drill down to life that can’t be contaminated from the surface).
For details see
It sounds as if the plan is to recategorize categoriy IVa as II.
BACK TO THE 2015 REVIEW
The 2015 review proposed modifications to 15 of the findings in the 2014 report, didn’t support one of them[39]., and said that some important aspects were not covered in the 2014 report.[43]
I have a short summary of its findings in the section Mars special regions
in my extended version of the Wikipedia article: Planetary protection
I also have a longer summary in the separate article here:
For instance, it didn’t cover
The 2014 report briefly considers these. The 2015 review expands on this topic, and says that to identify such potential habitats requires a better understanding of the temperature and water activity of potential microenvironments on Mars, for instance in the interior of craters, or microenvironments underneath rocks. These may provide favourable conditions for establishing life on Mars even when the landscape-scale temperature and humidity conditions would not permit it. [46]
The 2014 report looked at distributions of ice and concluded that ice in the tropics is buried too deep to be a consideration[47]
However the 2014/5 review corrected this due to evidence of ice present at depths of less than one meter in pole-facing slopes[48]
Research since then still hasn’t resolved these issues.
Even the 2014 report acknowledged limitations:
"Claims that reducing planetary protection requirements wouldn't be harmful, because Earth life can't grow on Mars, may be reassuring as opinion, but the facts are that we keep discovering life growing in extreme conditions on Earth that resemble conditions on Mars. We also keep discovering conditions on Mars that are more similar—though perhaps only at microbial scales—to inhabited environments on Earth, which is where the concept of Special Regions initially came from."
WHAT THE NEW REPORT SAYS
Supporting Finding: Various scientific studies 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 suggest that the survival and amplification of terrestrial biota are unlikely on the Martian surface, which would support classification of much of the Martian surface as Category II.
…
Major Recommendation:
NASA should reconsider how much of the Martian surface and sub surface could be Category II versus IV by revisiting assumptions and performing new analysis of transport, survival and amplification in order to reassess the risk of survival and propagation of terrestrial biota on Mars. All past U.S. landed missions have been treated as though there is a “significant” chance that terrestrial organisms can survive and be transported to areas where life or biosignature detection experiments would be performed. Rummel et al. (2014) have shown that many areas of the surface are not locations of PP concern. Similarly, although there may be subsurface regions that continue to warrant additional special PP consideration, this need not be the case for all subsurface regions . NASA should revisit the categorization of areas that are not considered to be “Special Regions” and determine limits on terrestrial bioload transport and amplification from current landing sites.
WOULD PERMIT PRIVATE SPACE TO “SMUGGLE” LIFE ONTO THEIR SPACECRAFT - PENALIZED IF THEY ARE DETECTED DOING THIS BUT NO CHECK MADE FIRST
They also say that it is impractical to require launch providers or satellite hosts to ensure that their payloads for Mars are free of biological contamination. They say that instead of doing that there should be a system of sanctions - that private space missions are penalized for contaminating Mars. What good is that?
They gave the example of the Beresheet lunar lander which had tardigrades onboard and this was not declared and they didn’t follow the planetary protection requirements for such missions - on the Moon there is no risk of forward contamination but there is a requirement to declare such things so that other missions can take account of them - if they find tardigrades on the Moon they know they came with this Israel lander.
Supporting Finding: It is impractical for launch providers or satellite hosts to definitively determine the biological content of every payload. Biological materials intentionally added by a bad actor are especially challengingfor launch providers to monitoror report, as they can be further obscured by falsified verification or inaccurate documentation.The recent experience in which a launch customer placed tardigrades and other biological samples on the SpaceIL Beresheet lunar lander is illustrative. By the Moon’s Category II PP designation, it is likely that a payload license would have been readily granted had the bioload been self-reported; however, the lack of such reporting created new issues relating to launch licensing.
Supporting Recommendation: Breaches of PP reporting or other requirements should be handled via sanctions that hold the root perpetrator accountable, rather than increasing the verification and regulatory burden on all actors.
If this is applied to Mars, it would mean that e.g. Elon Musk could send a mission to Mars that has lichens in it, say, as an experiment to see if they survive on Mars, and if he doesn’t declare this, it might not be detected until after it has got to Mars and the life starts to grow on Mars (if it does).
In a situation like that it seems that he would just be penalized and there would be no requirement before the mission to check that he isn’t doing such a thing.
