In a favorable growth environment, E. coli will double in number every 20 min. Unchecked, we'd be hip deep in E. coli in just a few days. A culture oven, agar growth media, and bam! it takes off.

If something from Mars was just scratching a living and barely surviving on the (sub)surface at real low temperatures, then got put on Earth with warmer temps, plentiful water, organic food sources abundant, and higher pressure atmosphere it might grow unchecked. (If the biochemistry was too alien, maybe nothing on Earth would consider it food!). The stuff could make life miserable just by overrunning everything. Space kudzu!

There are risks, we should be cautious, but we shouldn't stop exploring.

-Mike

[...]

Yeah. To paraphrase any number of people, the Universe ain't safe. It's beautiful, it's fascinating, it's glorious -- but if you want safe, go hide under your bed. (And even then, you ain't safe.)

The possibility of finding an alien microbe that could do great damage is probably on the same order as the Earth passing directly through the focused emission from a nearby gamma-ray burster. Either holds the potential of ending all life on Earth. The real difference is that we can take steps to make the threat from alien microbes even more remote than it already is, while there is nothing we can do about a close GRB (or a close supernova, or the passage of a large dark body through the inner Solar System, etc., etc., etc.) except to hope for just enough warning to insert our heads deeply between our knees, so we can kiss our arses g'bye!



-the other Doug

Why don't you ask the biologists It's simply impossible for an alien microbe to do any damage to our organisms

What worries me more is yet another delay of the mission.

Yes ... the real risk would be that it considered an Earth environment more favorable than Mars. That would probably mean it was terrestrial originally and recently ... otherwise it would be too adapted to Mars conditions and Earth would kill it. Thinking about this more, have there been any recent impacts big enough to throw meteorites to Mars? What's the risk of Viking, say, carrying microbes that could mutate in the high radiation environment? This seems the most likely threat (though still very unlikely, of course).

We biologists never say, It's simply impossible...

OK, sorry. I'm a biologist and will correct myself. The chance is extremely low.

I am surprised that Mars news from earlier this week seems to have escaped the notice of most. I am referring to NASA's solicitation on December 1, 2008 for Mars Ascent Vehicle Technologies, including concepts for MAV propulsion.
This is absolutely great! It seems that MSR has officially begun with this solicitation. What I like about this is NASA's desire to begin to reduce the technology risks for MSR as early as possible. I imagine that they have learned some lessons from MSL's mess stemming from an insuffficient Phase B and insufficient Mars Program technology development.

Here is the link to the solicitation -

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=29993


Another Phil

This seems to me hugely significant and very welcome. (Admins please delete if it's already appeared in another thread or move to a new thread if wou think it warrants one.) Mars sample return will now presumably be a joint venture.

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001763/

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but this is about the fifth such solicitation in the past 15 years. They result in some viewgraphs but nothing much else.

Again, not to be a wet blanket, but Weiler and the leaders of CNES made a similar agreement in 2002. Talk is cheap, funding reality something else.

Going furthur back, there were all the MSR studies at JPL in the 80s. The cost estimates were rather large, and MSR dissapeared for a decade or so while NASA moved on with Pathfinder and MGS.

And remember the late 90s? At that time Mars Sample Return was supposed to happen with the 2005 Mars launch opportunity. Somewhere along the line the French were going to provide the orbiter that would pick up the sample and return it to Earth.


Then Mars98 went down in flames, and NASA initiated a slate of more feasable (and properly funded) missions with MER and MRO.

The French orbiter turned into Netlander, then dissapeared altogether.


The bottom line is, MSR is tough to do, expensive as hell, and the launch date has been slipping for decades.

I'll believe MSR is happening about the time they bolt the first spacecraft to a launch vehicle.

I agree with those who point out that Mars Sample Return is tough to do and can be expensive. Let me suggest one way in which NASA can make MSR less difficult and less expensive.
I poropose that NASA omit any rover on its MSR Lander payload. If you scan through recent documents discussing the details of an MSR mission, then you will see that they include some type of rover. This rover would be designed to fetch a sample cache from an earlier rover and/or obtain samples of its own. In fact, one area of concern expressed in a recent document is that the MSR rover, if it does not pick up a sample cace, but must collect all of the samples for the MSR, will have only a few months to accomplish its mission.
I propose that NASA make the next planned rover, the Mars Prospector, an integral part of MSR. This will take care of several issues at once. The elimination of any type of rover on the MSR Lander will immediately result in savings of mass and a reduction in complexity. Both of those aspects will save a lot of money, both by allowing a less expensive booster to be used and by simplifying design, construction and testing of the Lander element of MSR. Without the need to stuff a rover on the landing platform, NASA will be able to focus on designing a reliable Mars Ascent Vehicle. In addition to the MAV, the Lander element could have a deep drill for sampling, as well as a simple scoop for contingency sample acquisition. Those aspects of the Lander element have already been prposed in recent MSR documents.
If the MSL rover proves that it is as long-lived as the MER rovers, then this will only add further support to my proposal to use the Prospector Rover as the primary means of sample acquisition for MSR. It will have had at least 1 year to prove itself before the MSR Lander is launched. By the way, adding a rover to the MSR Lander will not guarantee success, as that rover could go belly-up from day one of the mission.
By using the Prospector rover for MSR, we can make MSR more plausible. This does add a bit of risk to MSR, but I feel that not utilizing one of NASA's long-lived rover assets would be a waste. MSR must be made to be affordable or it will continue to be deferred.
My guess is that the Mars Prospector Rover could be launched in 2018 or 2020, with the NASA Lander/MAV and ESA Orbiter elements launched in 2020 or 2022.
I am guessing that there are a number of JPL and NASA folks who read UMSF. Can you tell me why this idea is not the way to go in this age of limited budgets?

Another Phil

With regards to recent NASA/ESA discussions, it looks like the 2016 "Mars prospector" mission is already starting to merge with ExoMars - there may not be a separate NASA mars rover mission - especially with the MSL overrun. However, assuming there is a Mars Prospector type mission prior to MSR, there are going to be a lot of "if's" - is it going to survive the x year gap between missions? How accurately are you going to land MSR? Sure we have been lucky with the MERs - but is MSL even going to be going as long as these?
Another point worth mentioning - unless someone starts making some Pu238 soon, any future Mars mission is not going to look like, or be based directly on MSL, since, as we all know, there is a dire shortage of Pu238 - and no one wants to stamp up the dollars ($250m Clinton era- probably closer to $0.5-1bil now?) to build a reactor to make more. RTGs only look cheap when using up Cold-war era stocks.

I think the problem is even wider than that. For instance, given the difficulty Phoenix had in getting volatiles delivered, just a few feet and in a day, to the science instruments, how much more difficulty is there in doing this and safely returning such samples, uncontaminated and complete, over a year later, to Earth? If MSR is just one large major mission like MSL, how much is it really going to be telling us about Mars as a whole? Remember with the moon missions, we had multiple impactors (Rangers), soft landers (Surveyors) and then 6 Apollo missions - and we still didn't find out about the potential volatiles at the poles until the 90's. Given that one objective is to prove Mars is sufficiently sterile that a manned mission would not ruin it, I would have thought more than one sample point is desirable.

I am sure someone more qualified will correct me, but I had the impression that the real show-stopper for MSR is the landed weight for a return rocket (even the more modest orbital docking version) - rather than the rover/mobility aspect. One interesting proposition by a space enthusiast (will dig up a ref later) suggested a much more modest MSR mission - using a very small solid booster rocket *just* sufficient to deliver a small Mars sample package to low orbit, together with a beacon - the package would have no manuevering capacity. The sample is picked up in orbit by the return craft. That way, all the weight and complexity of Earth-return is shifted to the orbital craft - the landed portion could be modest in size. The advantage to this approach could be having more than one sample return lander - one or two orbital pickup/return craft could collect samples from many smallish landers..

Edit: Can't find the article I was looking for, but this is interesting .

Google turned this up, Mars Exploration Program Status (Michael Meyer, 2008):



(Emphasis mine.) So it seems thoughts along those lines are being considered. AFAIK MSL is unlikely to be still around in the 2020 timeframe - RTGs can't be cleaned by lucky gusts of wind.