There are aliens on Mars – and they came from Earth. That's the reasoning behind a controversial new push to relax the current planetary protection rules, a set of sterilisation procedures that every Mars-bound spacecraft must undergo to avoid contaminating the Red Planet with terrestrial microbes.
Since 1967, the restrictive rules have made missions that would probe for life on Mars costly and inefficient, a pair of Mars scientists argues. What's more, no sterilisation system is perfect, and so chances are we have already contaminated Mars with trace amounts of earthly microbes carried by our rovers and landers.
Instead, governments could be sending rovers that dig deeper and try more complex experiments, or they could save the money spent on protection efforts to fund a more diverse array of spacecraft.
"Right now it has this bad effect," says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University in Pullman. "It hampers missions – especially the interesting missions." That includes the types of missions that would search for signs of life, he adds.
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