Astrobiologist Barry DiGregorio fears astronauts on Mars could die “live on air” after being exposed to deadly alien pathogens as NASA aims to send people to the Red Planet in the 2030s
Mars samples returned to Earth by NASA could spark a pandemic worse than Covid-19 in as little as 10 years, a scientist has warned.
Astrobiologist Barry DiGregorio, 71, even fears astronauts on Mars will die “live on air” over deadly alien pathogens. NASA says on its website it hopes to send humans to the Red Planet in the 2030s. It was planning to return samples before then through its Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, but that was cancelled by Donald Trump’s recent cuts. Instead NASA says it expects to return samples to Earth through lower-cost missions, without yet confirming how.
And DiGregorio, an honorary research fellow at Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology, fears samples returned will be riddled with disease. He also claims aliens were already found by the Viking Mars lander mission in 1976.
The author of Discovery on Vera Rubin Ridge, Trace Fossils on Mars said: “I believe samples from Mars could lead to a pandemic because Gilbert Levin discovered life on Mars during the Viking missions. The environmental conditions of Mars are so vastly different than here on Earth that any life that adapted to those conditions could be completely different to anything that we understand.
“Levin felt the same way. He was always opposed to bringing samples home before we studied what the life that he found on Mars is. Lately they’ve been finding examples of extremophiles in areas where they put spacecraft before they’re sent to the planets, and they’ve discovered a whole new line of extremophiles here on Earth that they never knew existed before. Therefore we have been sending all our rovers and landers to Mars without a complete sterilisation.
“We were sending to Mars from Earth the type of extremophiles that can survive in very hardy places. So we’re not only contaminating Mars, but with the Mars sample return situation, we could be doing the exact same thing by bringing stuff back from Mars.”
He added: “It is possible that NASA hasn’t really thought through the idea that these astronauts, presumably, will be televised. Something really bad could go wrong live on air. I don’t think there’s any question about it. If one astronaut steps out to plant the flag on Mars and goes back in for the night to catch some rest, and in the morning comes down with symptoms of some new disease, what are you going to do?
“They have to wait a year or more to come back to Earth and there’s no rescue mission that can be sent there. So the smart thing to do is to send more life detection rovers. You want astronauts to be safe if they go exploring Mars. You don’t want to send them to become human petri dishes.”
Levin made the explosive claim he’d discovered microbial alien life on Mars during the 1976 missions. He had been contracted to run tests on Martian soil but his theory was dismissed by NASA.
He spent the rest of his life adamant he was the first man to discover aliens, before he died at the age of 97 in 2021. After NASA had landed two Viking landers on Mars, Levin claimed he’d found the presence of radioactive gas that showed signs of alien life.
But NASA determined this was not the case in a separate experiment from Viking. Recently, former NASA Planetary Protection Officer, Catharine Conley, claims she was fired because she said plans to return Mars samples to Earth were not safe.
She told The Sun : “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 per cent 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 the headquarters management wanted to hear and they took the steps that they thought were appropriate.”
DiGregorio added: “We need life detection to find current life that exists there now. Tests like those that Gilbert Levin used to detect metabolism on Mars, a very accurate method for detecting microorganisms. There have been many opportunities to go back to check this out for astronaut safety.”
He added: “Microbes attach themselves to dust particles. Mars is a very dry and dusty place and one of the problems the Apollo missions had was when the astronauts returned from their EVAs, they brought lots and lots of dust on their suits inside the compartment with them.
“When they took them off, the dust was getting everywhere. In fact they could smell it. It smelled like burnt gunpowder, they said.
“If you remember the Apollo mission planetary protection protocols, we weren’t really sure if there were microbes on the Moon, and to prevent cross contamination, the astronauts had to wear isolation gowns, put them on inside the capsule as it was bobbing up and down in the ocean and a recovery crew came to pick them and take them up in a helicopter.
“It took them to the aircraft carrier where a makeshift trailer designed to be an isolation booth housed the astronauts for a period of a couple weeks while scientists back on Earth were looking for samples in the lunar dust that might have been contaminated.
“The thing that was really odd was as soon as they opened the capsule door to the sea, lunar dust particles that were in the capsule could have been swept out and into the ocean. So if there was any kind of extremophile microorganisms on the Moon that could survive in the Earth Sea, we just contaminated the planet right then and there. We’re basically gambling with whatever is out there.”
In response to DiGregorio’s comments, NASA said: “It is anticipated that future missions to Mars will return samples for study on Earth. NASA will never compromise on safety.”
