Obsessed with hygiene (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Corbis)
Editorial: “There may already be aliens on Mars“
TO FIND life on Mars, we need to stop being so overprotective of our smaller sibling. So argue two Mars scientists behind a controversial new push to relax planetary protection rules – a set of sterilisation procedures that Mars-bound spacecraft must undergo to avoid contaminating the planet with terrestrial microbes.
The existing rules have made missions that would probe for Martian life costly and inefficient, the pair argues in an editorial published last week in Nature Geoscience (). Also, no sterilisation system is perfect, so chances are…
