A TOP scientist claims she was sacked by Nasa after raising concerns about alien life on Mars.
Catharine Conley, the agency’s Planetary Protection Officer from 2006 to 2017, also fears SpaceX astronauts won’t come home alive.
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Conley first accused officials at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in California of failing to clean the Mars 2020 rover correctly before its launch.
Mars 2020 is Nasa’s mission sent to search for samples of the Red Planet to bring home and test for evidence of past or current alien life.
The rover, Perseverance, is still crawling around the surface after landing in February 2021.
Its job is to obtain the samples which will then be collected by a future Mars Sample Return Mission.
But Conley feared any material eventually flown home could be contaminated – and the whole mission scuppered.
She claims she was suddenly removed from the position after speaking out – and suspects it was to silence her concerns.
Conley told The Sun: “Nasa decided they didn’t want to do the kind of work that I had been doing.
“They didn’t want to continue with the kinds of implementation that they had been doing historically.
“That was not something I thought was a good idea, so they decided they needed someone else for the job.
“This was basic planetary protection as it had been done for the prior 50 years or so.”
Conley, who now works as a researcher, added: “The Mars 2020 rover was cleaned in a way that was not compatible with prior levels of cleanliness, in particular regarding the amount of contamination that was getting introduced into the samples that were being collected for return.
“I pointed out that having a 0.1% chance of contaminating any individual sample, when you have 40 samples in total, comes out to a 4 per cent chance of having Earth contamination in the samples you’re looking at.
“That makes it fairly difficult to be confident that you can distinguish between Earth life and Mars life.
“That was not something that the people at headquarters management wanted to hear and they took the steps that they thought were appropriate.”
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Conley claims she had been told of staff being careless when using gloves and protective equipment.
She also claimed to have been told of staff bringing equipment into assembly rooms that was not properly cleaned, along with an “attitude of skepticism I encountered regularly at JPL”.
Nasa states on its website that Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover remains an active mission.
It landed in February 2021 as part of Nasa’s Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign.
In January the agency said it was hoping to announce plans for the returning of samples in the second half of 2026.
But that has been thrown into doubt following Donald Trump’s proposed cuts to Nasa, with MSR a casualty.
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China is preparing to press ahead with their own plans to return Mars samples.
It has scheduled the Tianwen-3 Mars mission for launch in 2028, collecting and bringing samples back by 2031.
But Conley still fears the same problem.
She said: “The concerns are similar. I’ve been looking at some of the reports that have come out about the Chinese proposed missions, and they’re saying all the right things to the extent that I can obtain information.
“But it is difficult to follow up on what they are actually saying they’re doing.
“I certainly had experience within my duties at Nasa of engineers saying one thing and doing something else.
“So it’s difficult to know. But if other space agencies are not doing anything more than Nasa did, then I would be surprised if their contamination levels are low enough that you could detect the Mars signal underneath the background from Earth.”
Despite the cuts, Trump has proposed no savings on Nasa’s plans to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s.
Nasa’s mission to Mars
Nasa hopes to send astronauts to Mars as early as the 2030s.
The space company has been working to advance its technologies in a bid to send a human crew to the Red Planet.
It would take astronauts up to nine months to reach Mars – which even at its closest is 33.9 million miles away.
Astronauts could then spend up to 500 days on the planet’s surface before returning to Earth – which would take another nine months.
The crew would spend their time on the planet collecting data and assessing the planetary alignment that would allow the spacecraft to land and depart from Mars on the same orbit.
Last year, the agency completed a year-long simulated mission that saw four crew members out in a replica habitat in Houston, Texas.
They logged 378 days in the 1,700-square-foot, 3D-printed habitat called Mars Dune Alpha.
But Conley fears that doing so without a sample return mission means a gaping hole in knowledge for what astronauts will encounter.
She also questions if astronauts will be allowed home if they fall sick.
Conley added: “Not doing a robotic sample return means we don’t have detailed information about what kinds of materials the astronauts are likely to encounter, and possibly bring back to Earth, which could be quite problematic if there is something hazardous in Mars regolith, even if it’s not biological.
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“A question that didn’t get answered during Apollo and certainly hasn’t been addressed since is: if astronauts get sick after contacting Mars and we can’t figure out why, should they be allowed to return?
“The fundamental problem, from my perspective, is overconfidence in thinking that we already know everything we need to know about what could happen, when we don’t.”
Conley also warned of Elon Musk’s plans to send a manned crew to Mars through his company, SpaceX.
She added: “SpaceX say they’re planning to launch humans to Mars, but I have serious doubts about whether anyone would be alive when the spacecraft gets there since SpaceX doesn’t seem to be developing long-term life support systems along with their rockets.
“Musk has made numerous claims about when he’ll land humans on Mars that are distinctly implausible, at least if he wants the humans to be alive when they get there.
“Nasa is much more likely to be careful about preserving astronaut health but, ironically, seems not similarly concerned about protecting the Earth from possible Mars contamination.”
The Sun has approached Nasa for a response to Conley’s allegations.
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