BOLD Plan To Find Mars Life On the Cheap 61
techfun89 writes "There is a BOLD new plan for detecting signs of microbial life on Mars. The nickname is BOLD, which stands for Biological Oxidant and Life Detection Initiative, would be a follow-up to the 1976 Mars Viking life-detection experiments. 'We have much better technology that we could use,' says BOLD lead scientist Dirk Schulze-Makuch, with Washington State University. He elaborates, 'Our idea is to make a relatively cheap mission and go more directly to characterize and solve the big question about the soil properties on Mars and life detection.' To help figure out the life-detection mystery, Schulze-Makuch and his colleagues would fly a set of six pyramid-shaped probes that would crash land, pointy end down, so they embed themselves four to eight inches into the soil. One of the instruments includes a sensor that can detect a single molecule of DNA or other nucleotide."
I may be mad... (Score:4, Insightful)
Just six static probes? Good grief. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mars may be smaller than Terra, but it's still an awfully big place. Even if life exists or once existed on Mars, there's no guarantees its presence would leave a mark everywhere. Six immovable probes might find nothing and STILL not answer the question. The only way we get a useful answer at all from just six bullets fired into the dunes is that one of them actually finds something; if they find nothing it still doesn't disprove the presence of life.
It's great that the people behind this want to make names for themselves, but we need to think - and plan and budget - much bigger than this if we truly want a definitive answer. This plan with a spaghetti western budget won't give us one. It's essentially a waste of time. Bold, yes, but also pointless where the stated goal is concerned.
Re:Microscope? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because we can't reliably detect unknown life on THIS planet with an optical microscope?