There is no question that humans will one day explore Mars. But it will take some time. NASA's new administrator Sean O'Keefe asks, "What is the difference between what we are doing on Mars now and the preparation we would have to do for a manned mission? The answer is nothing. Our unmanned exploration of Mars is just the homework we need to be doing for any eventual manned mission."

There are a lot of questions that need answering before man steps on Mars, not the least of which is whether we might somehow contaminate Mars with germs from Earth, and visa-versa. Recently I spoke to Dr. John Rummel, the Planetary Protection Officer for NASA. Rummel said that he would be talking about robotic landers.

"We do a really thorough job of cleaning them to a very low level of contamination. In general, there are parts of the spacecraft that can be cleaned by hand using alcohol rubs and other solutions, and other parts are heat-treated," said Dr. Rummel. "The Viking Spacecraft and Lander launched to Mars in the mid-1970s was surface cleaned reducing Earth spores to a very small amount. Then the entire spacecraft was             heat-treated by placing it in what I call,'a casserole dish' - a thing called a bio-shield, at Kennedy Space Center. The bio-shield remained in place around the Viking Spacecraft and Lander until it was in space and no longer needed. It was thoroughly heat-treated and controlled. In 1992 the National Research Council, after studying the data from Viking, and how the spacecraft was prepared, recommended to NASA that the pre-heat sanitation treatment should be enough for use on future missions to Mars to prevent the contamination of Mars from Earth organisms," Rummel stated. "So far, I think that is reasonable. If we find places that are warmer and wetter, or beneath the Martian surface, then the sterilization process may have to be reversed to a 'post-heat' level of sterilization for the trip back to Earth. We are more interested and more likely to find something alive under the surface in a warm, wet environment," said Dr. Rummel.

According to Eric Collins of the NASA Astrobiology Academy, "Although we try to lower contamination  to a bare minimum, it is generally accepted that small numbers of bacteria will be released on the surface of Mars. But because we don't know of any 'germs' on Earth that can live in the harsh oxidizing and UV (ultra-violet) radiation environment of the Martian surface, the risk of contaminating Mars is minimized. This fact also makes it exceedingly unlikely that we will accidentally bring any Martian microbes back with us to Earth."

Dr. James Gavin, NASA's senior Mars scientist also alludes to the amount of knowledge and technology we need to learn before a manned mission is possible. "It will take us a decade. But when we can, we will do it," he said. "It is a distance 1,500 times further than the distance we traveled to the Moon. In the history of  human exploration there has never been such a leap as we will take from the Moon to Mars."

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