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By Leonard David
SPACE.com's Space Insider Columnist
posted: 7 January 2009
Russia is pushing forward on a robotic mission to Mars dubbed Phobos-Grunt - now seemingly on a countdown clock that ticks away for an October launch.
If the project is on track and off the ground by that time, Phobos-Grunt would arrive at the red planet in August of next year.[...]
But what caught my eye was another payload on this heady mission - detailed in a couple of recent articles - that Russia is also dispatching on the flight the "world's hardiest" or "toughest" organisms found here on Earth, sealed up in a bio-container for the Earth-to-Mars/Mars to Earth three year trek. The bio-module will provide 30 small tubes for individual microbe samples. [...]
...It is called forward contamination.
Under The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, planetary protection policies are in place to prevent cross contamination between planets - avoiding both forward contamination on outbound spacecraft, and back contamination of Earth upon return. For this mission, it's the possibility of forward contamination that's raises concerns.
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