Martian samples will be brought to the Utah Test and Training Range, Earth’s own Martian landscape. There, scientists can study the samples with the heavy instrumentation that Earth labs allow.
The likelihood is low that bringing Martian rocks to Earth will make us sick, but NASA isnÕt taking any chances. When Carl Sagan imagined sending humans to Mars in his book “The Cosmic Connection,” published in 1973, he posed a problem beyond such a mission’s cost and complexity: the possibility that life already existed on the red planet and that it might not play nice.
No one can say for sure that such material will not contain tiny Martians. If it does, no one can yet say for sure they are not harmful to Earthlings. Because no existing lab was both contained and clean enough for NASA, four scientists, including Dr. Harrington, went on a tour of some of the planet’s most dangerous facilities. She was joined by three colleagues, and they called themselves “NASA Tiger Team RAMA.
Materials from around the solar system have come to Earth for study before: moon rocks and dust from American, Soviet and Chinese missions; samples from two asteroids collected by Japanese probes; and particles from solar wind and a comet gathered by spacecraft. But Mars presents what NASA deems “significant” backward contamination risk, so samples from the red planet fall under a legal category called “Restricted Earth-Return.
Once the spacecraft approaches this pale blue dot, optimistically in 2033, the samples will fall to the desert of the expansive Utah Test and Training Range, Earth’s own Martian landscape. Then, scientists can study the samples with the heavy instrumentation that Earth labs allow.
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