Plus, unwanted interactions between Earth microbes and Martian microbes might lead to the extinction of Martian microbes ?
Imagine an archaeologist saying to his students "Don't worry about stomping all through this dig site of the greatest Neanderthal city ever discovered. We'll be able to reverse engineer the imprints of Neanderthal moccasins from under your sneaker prints. And those KFC chicken bones you're tossing around won't take too long to separate from these priceless bones in the dig with these powerful microscopes and a few months of time. After all, we have unlimited time and budget and resources - because we planned all this ahead of time and we left all the rest of our equipment 50 million miles away. Why, I imagine, after a year of sorting out your pollution, we'll be ready to do some new science."
I'm not holding out for any rover to do this job, no matter how sophisticated. I think any serious investigation of Martian life is going to require human "boots on the ground." Again, I try to follow the manned mission to Mars community as closely as I can, and the writing on the wall is that we are probably looking at 2032-33 for the first human Mars landing. Something about the planetary orbits during that time is beneficial. So that's my guess. Any time before that is too soon. Despite people like Robert Zubrin equating a Mars landing to the moon mission, it is waaay more complicated than that. Any time after 2033 is going to lose a momentum we seem to have right now. I think the news conference today just ups the ante on that date, which is a good thing
.The overriding point here is that we can count on a probe to do the job.
The problem they've been facing all along is that microbes can be extremely resilient, surviving even in space.
Exactly.
If some ancient martian bacteria had been blasted into space, probably as a result of an impacting meteor, and eventually arrived on Earth...
Life on Earth today had 4 billion years of evolution - it looks significantly different from life back then. Could be invisible to a microscope, but DNA sequencing (if they have DNA at all - could still be based on RNA or something new that evolved on Mars) would reveal the difference.
This is another big reason for sending humans to Mars (soon) to sort this out. One of the principle "Earth" life mysteries is what happened to intermediate stages of the evolution of life from inanimate matter to the first prokaryotic cells, which are extremely complex in their function. One theory was that life originated on Mars and that a "panspermia" event there knocked out some already highly evolved prokaryotes that were seeded on Earth a few billion years ago. According to that theory, what we might find on Mars is evidence of those intermediate stages of cellular evolution. I don't personally think that this is what happened, but it is possible. And that's the point, there is so much to learn and rule out or rule in. The presence of liquid water on the surface is simply begging for a thorough analysis. The possibly of finding something unexpected and significant is tantalizingly high.
Agreed!
Thanks for the info (and others as well). Not sure how I feel about that (generally negative, but need to put more thought into it), but don't really want to get into it now. Maybe a topic for another thread.
If you mean the manned Mars mission; the general idea is manned flyby by 2033 and landing by 2037; after the completely unnecessary asteroid re-direct in 2025; there are factions trying to replace asteroid re-direct with a Mars and Venus flyby mission in 2025 which would push forward the Mars landing by a few years.
Do we need a manned mission to do this job ? Why can't we send a well sterilised rover better equipped than the current ones to go and do the job?
I wasn't referring to any one specific job, just the general plan of the manned program; but humans are better equipped to find life on Mars than robots are. If fossils exist on Mars, Curiosity and the 2020 rover and such like are more than likely to gloss over them; though a sterilized rover would probably do just fine with something like flowing water, but even then careful human hands would be preferable.
Is water always an origin of any life ?
We don't know, but on Earth they are closely linked.
That sounds very optimistic. This article estimates 2030 for the first flight of the fully upgraded space launch system - and you probably don't want to fly to another planet with the maiden flight of a rocket, 5 years of backwards time travel not included.
There are different stages with increasing payload. A mission to Mars needs much more payload than a mission to L1 or L2.
I don't doubt what the scientists are aware of, I questioned the quality of the news article as at least one statement there is way too strong given the quoted reference I found so quickly.