See today's news item concluding that at least one of the Antarctic dry
valleys' permafrost is sterile....
Bill
On Wednesday, January 20, 2016, Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Wed, 20 Jan 2016, John Dom wrote:
As long as those stages are professionally sterilized. Even sending
tardigrade space resistant creatures ;-) to Mars would require them to be
locked up in an impact safe capsule in order not to contaminate the planet
with them.
Even Mars landers these days generally are not actually sterilized. They
*are* cleaned to reduce bacterial load, to minimize the chance of local
contamination that might confuse later life-detection work, but full
sterilization is hard on equipment and not thought necessary unless the
lander is actually carrying life-detection equipment (in which case you
obviously need to avoid false alarms). The surface conditions on Mars are
a better sterilizer than anything we can do easily on Earth.
(Greater precautions would be needed for "special regions" of Mars, e.g.
attempts to drill to serious depths, where conditions might be less
hostile.)
For a rocket stage, all that's considered necessary is to aim it so it
will reliably miss Mars.
Henry
