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Russia's Mars Mission Raising Concerns
eldavojohn writes "Space.com has a blog on Russia's Phobos-Grunt project designed to explore the planet further. He voices concerns about part of this exploration that is dubbed LIFE (Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment) and backed by The Planetary Society that involves sending several samples of Earth's hardiest microbes to see if they can survive the round trip voyage. Space.com's correspondent Leonard David did some legwork to ensure that The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 was being upheld as it prevents cross-contamination between planets and receives some interesting responses from experts on this mission. The Phobos-Grunt mission will also deploy a Chinese sub-satellite 'Firefly-1,' which will attempt to figure out how water on Mars disappeared. Unfortunately, The United States is not taking part in Phobos-Grunt."
I don't know why we're so concerned about cross-contamination. The only potential downside to it that I can see is if it obscures evidence that life existed on other planets.
I just find it hard to care about balls of rock and their 'pristine environment'.
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...if they find any leather goddesses.
The more I hear about Mars, the more the analogy between the 1400-1700s exploration of America seems fit.
Whereas previously it had seemed (at least within my worldview) that USA was the only entity even considering Martian missions. Now it seems that USA, China, Russia, the EU, and India are in the same sort of colonization race that England, Spain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands were in hundreds of year ago.
And what did that accomplish? Well, the host nations managed to spread their languages and gene pools to their "New World" destinations, but 300 years later the "mighty conquests" have all but melted into air as almost all of America's nations have attained independence.
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If we did discover native extra-terrestrial microbes it would answer a lot of interesting questions. If it had a similar DNA basis it would support the idea of panspermia - that life on earth may have been seeded by space. If it is totally different who knows what we might learn.
It would also be interesting to ask the young earth creationists on which day God created the Martian life and if Noah really had two of every species how did he get the samples form Mars.
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Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
With a mission name like Phobos-Grunt, I was immediately tempted to add the 'leathergoddesses' tag. Now if only I could find my "T remover" device.
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Read the Treaty Text. The original poster is a retard. The original purpose of the outer space treaty was essentially a deal to keep a great power from "taking over" space, made at a time, when the military importance of space was recognized but no leading nation was willing to bet its future on it winning the space race.
http://www.state.gov/t/ac/trt/5181.htm
There is absolutely nothing that precludes the deposit of life on other planets. Its legal to seed the moon, mars or any other body with life and to terraform it.
This is my sig.
Hey, wouldn't a successful transplant of an organism from one planet to another show that life is more possible?
No. Given that the laws of physics apply everywhere, we expect Earth life to live anywhere there are suitable conditions. We also have a pretty good of what are "suitable conditions". In other words, we know that successful transplant of an organism from one planet to another is possible. Actually doing it is much less useful as a result.
Well, no, because, if you put life on Mars, there would be extraterrestrial life, now, wouldn't it?
Nope. It'd be terrestrial life on another planet. The point remains. If something is living on Mars now that isn't something we dragged from Earth, then that is tremendously valuable, even if it turns out to be equivalent to primitive bacteria. If we put terrestrial life on Mars, we risk destroying this data.
I remember them! The OTHER failed state!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Unfortunately, The United States is not taking part in Phobos-Grunt."
What's unfortunate about this? Why should everyone participate in everything? As I see it competition remains the best form of cooperation. It is good that there are Mars missions that don't involve the US. That means that they can develope their own technology, procedures, etc without US contamination. We are more likely to see new innovations this way.
I don't really see the "tremendous value" in that knowledge. Or, more accurately, I can't fathom why that knowledge would be more valuable than learning that we can successfully transplant living organisms and watch them thrive.
What is the value of life in the first place? As I see it, it is the culmination of billions of years of evolution. The same goes for native life on Mars with one important exception. It is unlikely that there is any evolution in common with Earth (unless some of the panspermia theories are correct). New biological processes, new knowledge unlike anything seen on Earth. It might even be incorporated into terrestrial life at some point to improve survivability or other properties. That'd be valuable. And if we find evidence of panspermia. Then you have a huge puzzle bigger than merely figuring out how to spread life around.
I don't really care where life came from, I want to know where it can go.
It can go anywhere. So now that you know, can we get back to not erasing important data?
Its probably extremely important to know where life came from to understand where it can go. After all unless you can see the future, you only have the past and the now to go off of.
I'm sure some people might not have seen the tremendous value in the mould gave us penicillin. Fortunately someone did.
Let's send some Australian Rabbits (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia) to Mars instead.
The idea of importing rabbits into Australia seems to have worked out ok.
And the soil of Australia is red, just like Mars.
This should work.
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I find it funny that we are concerned with damaging an extraterrestrial biosphere but are completely ok with trashing our own. I bet those up in arms about some _potential_ mars bacteria being wiped out, give a shrug and a yawn when told of the countless Earth species on the brink of extinction. I'm not saying they aren't worth protecting, but rather, we need to get our priorities straight here on the ground too.
The 'real estate' value of Mars is always so totally overstated. NOBODY WILL EVER LIVE THERE. You want to know why?
1) Because it will make much more sense to live in free space (IE on an asteroid or space colony) where you avoid the huge energy cost of going up and down a gravity well.
2) Mars provides virtually nothing in the way of resources which are not available in places easier to get to.
3) The environment of Mars is actually MUCH harsher than the environment in space, and probably much harsher than the environment of the Moon. So why exactly would we so desire to live there?
4) If environments as harsh as Mars are desirable real estate for people to live on, then why aren't Antarctica and Green Land, and the Sahara Desert all chock full of people already? They are CERTAINLY much less harsh and much cheaper places to live. Good luck selling those Martian building lots...
5) Even speculating about Terraforming is pretty much beyond science. The time and energy inputs required are probably 1000's and maybe millions or billions of times anything we can deploy today. The time frame could easily range into the millions of years no matter how capable you are. There is certainly no sense at all in planning a space program based on a payoff that somehow relies on a technology that is no more than an idle dream which might exist in 200 or 1000 years, if ever.
This does all tie in to some extent to the OP, Mars' value is not ever going to be economic. Its value is purely scientific and there is no reasonable anticipation that it will ever be otherwise. Spoiling the pristine conditions on Mars would seriously degrade the value of exo-biology work done there in the future. So it IS a bad idea, and it would be a costly mistake.
Now, the question of the actual safety of Phobos-Grunt is a whole other thing. We'll just have to leave that to experts. At least they value the principle of avoiding contamination. Maybe they're a little biased, but the risk doesn't seem super excessive to me. OTOH it also sounds like the experiment itself is mostly a PR stunt, so on that basis I'd give it the thumbs down. Not worth making a huge stink about though.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Good luck with creating that Martian atmosphere.
The solar wind will rip it away as it forms.
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then we need a solar wind-shield!
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I don't really see the "tremendous value" in that knowledge. Or, more accurately, I can't fathom why that knowledge would be more valuable than learning that we can successfully transplant living organisms and watch them thrive.
If life happened to happen independently in the very same solar system then that says an enormous amount about the probability of life elsewhere in the galaxy.
That's just wrong. It's not the relative amount of carbon dioxide which is important. It's the absolute concentration of carbon dioxide which is important. Mars is so cold because its atmosphere is so thin. Adding a thicker atmosphere will cause Mars to become warmer.
just send a robot to go and die there. Really, it would a whole lot cheaper. Why do we need people there again?
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
We (other nations) have also benefited hugely from the US investment into science and space.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
I thought Mars' thin atmosphere had less to do with gravity and more to do with the fact that Mars has much less of a magnetic field, thus allowing the solar wind to blow away what atmosphere the planet has? In fact, there was an article or two not all that long ago wherein scientists had discovered that Mars' magnetic field sometimes even paunches out, forming loops that hasten the process of atmospheric erosion.
Lemme see... Okay, here's an older article talking about how Mars has a very weak magnetic field, with the planet therefore facing the full brunt of the solar wind. And here's the more recent one that I remember, describing how Martian magnetic fields loop far out from the planet in narrow columns, ultimately pinching off big blobs of atmospheric gases far above the surface where the gases then get blown away by the solar wind. Interesting reads, both of them.
So, in a nutshell, it seems to have much less to do with gravity, and much more to do with planetary magnetic fields. Mars is afforded much less protection by its magnetic field compared to the Earth.
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