Earth microbes trying to make it to Mars must survive sterilization in NASA's clean rooms, harsh cosmic rays during months of space travel and the Red Planet's unforgiving surface environment.
But any bacteria that successfully hitchhike aboard the wheels of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity in 2012 might manage to scratch out a brief existence on the Martian surface.
That finding comes from a study that examined how the new high-tech landing technique of Curiosity, the centerpiece of NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, may affect the risk of contaminating Mars.
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