Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment - Criticism

Criticism

Barry E. DiGregorio, the director of the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return, criticised the LIFE experiment on the Fobos-Grunt mission as a violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 due to its risk of contaminating Phobos or Mars with the microbial spores and live bacteria it contains. While the mission was supposed to land and return from Phobos, a moon of Mars, the risk to Mars itself would have been from the possibility of Fobos-Grunt losing control and crash landing on the planet. It was speculated that the heat-resistant extremophile bacteria would have been particularly able to survive such a crash, on the basis that heat resistant bacteria Microbispora survived the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.

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