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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday September 08 2016, @03:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the rover-needs-a-condom dept.

Four years into its travels across Mars, NASA’s Curiosity rover faces an un­expected challenge: wending its way safely among dozens of dark streaks that could indicate water seeping from the red planet’s hillsides.

Although scientists might love to investigate the streaks at close range, strict international rules prohibit Curiosity from touching any part of Mars that could host liquid water, to prevent contamination. But as the rover begins climbing the mountain Aeolis Mons next month, it will probably pass within a few kilometres of a dark streak that grew and shifted between February and July 2012 in ways suggestive of flowing water.

NASA officials are trying to determine whether Earth microbes aboard Curiosity could contaminate the Martian seeps from a distance. If the risk is too high, NASA could shift the rover’s course — but that would present a daunting geographical challenge. There is only one obvious path to the ancient geological formations that Curiosity scientists have been yearning to sample for years (see ‘All wet?’).

[...] The streaks — dubbed recurring slope lineae (RSLs) because they appear, fade away and re­appear seasonally on steep slopes — were first reported 1 on Mars five years ago in a handful of places. The total count is now up to 452 possible RSLs. More than half of those are in the enormous equatorial canyon of Valles Marineris, but they also appear at other latitudes and longitudes. “We’re just finding them all over the place,” says David Stillman, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who leads the cataloguing.

[...] Curiosity was only partly sterilized before going to Mars, and experts at JPL and NASA headquarters in Washington DC are calculating how long the remaining microbes could survive in Mars's harsh atmosphere — as well as what weather conditions could transport them several kilometres away and possibly contaminate a water seep. "That hasn't been well quantified for any mission," says Vasavada.

http://www.nature.com/news/mars-contamination-fear-could-divert-curiosity-rover-1.20544


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 08 2016, @02:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 08 2016, @02:47PM (#399174)

    You would be surprised what a simple enough organism can survive.

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