NASA Wants To Bring Back Hunks of Mars In Future Unmanned Mission 82
coondoggie writes "The space missions to Mars have so far been one way — satellites and robotic rovers have all gone there to stay. NASA, as part a of a new, ambitious Mars visit, wants to change that by sending a rover to the surface of the Red Planet which can dig up chunks of the surface and send them back to Earth for highly detailed examination. These plans were laid out in a lengthy report outlining mission plans for Mars that will be acted upon over the next decade. It says a retrieval mission 'could occur as early as the mid-2020s or wait until the 2030s.'"
Re:Killer microbes (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost zero. Mars rocks have been hitting earth for some time and in any case microbes have to evolve to infect humans, it is not something likely to happen for a mars microbe. In any case they will use the same quarantine process they used for the moon rocks and in that case the microbes would have had to have been very hardy to survive vacuum and solar radiation, yet they still quarantined them. So you can be sure the risk is close to zero.
On the other hand we have enough risks here on earth that we don't jump up and down enough about. Still, the power of the unknown risk freaks people out more.