Mars Is Pretty Clean. Her Job at NASA Is to Keep It That Way. - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/science/mars-catharine-conley-nasa-planetary-protection-officer.html?smid=tw-nytime
Histoire de ne pas reproduire ce que les conquêtes coloniales ont causé
comme destructions, aux Amériques par exemple. Mais bon, on ne contrôle pas ce qu’on ne connaît pas.
“If we’re going to look for life on Mars, it would be really kind of lame to bring Earth life and find that instead,” Dr. Conley said.
With the news last week that scientists had identified areas of flowing water on the Martian surface — some possibly reachable by NASA’s Curiosity rover — that concern has taken on new urgency.
Thousands, millions, sometimes many times more, bacteria travel across the solar system on spacecraft. Earth has been invading Mars since November 1971, when the Soviet Mars 2 lander crashed. Certainly life exists on Mars today — the microbes that have hitchhiked from Earth. Even in the harsh environs of Mars — cold, dry, bombarded by ultraviolet light — it takes many years for all of them to be killed off.
The concern is that some of them might not only survive but thrive.
