Earth and Martian Microbes Aboard Curiosity on Mars: The Interview

NASA officials are trying to determine whether Earth microbes aboard Curiosity could contaminate the potential 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?’).

“We’re very excited to get up to these layers and find the 3-billion-year-old water,” says Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “Not the ten-day-old water.”

The streaks — dubbed recurring slope lineae (RSLs) because they appear, fade away and re­appear seasonally on steep slopes — were first reported1 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.

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

http://www.nature.com/news/water-seems-to-flow-freely-on-mars-1.14343
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http://www.asianage.com/science-health/nasas-curiosity-rover-begins-exploring-new-mars-destinations-733