Looks like Barry D was right. I recall the arguments put forth last year by the MSR faithful and the one person who shall remain unnamed here (can go along with ..Sunshine Band), critized Barry relentlessly and insisted NASA had everything in place for MSR including the money for an approriate quarantine facility. The latest report from the National Academy of Science SSB proves this wrong. NASA was going planning MSR as early as 2003 for the first samples to be gathered. Clearly they did not have the means or facility to handle them. This report by David Chandler of the Boston Globe pretty much says it all:

Mars rocks seen coming before means to handle them

Samples, Earth feared in danger of contamination

By David L. Chandler, Globe Staff, 5/30/2001

f NASA goes ahead with plans to bring Martian rocks back to Earth early next decade, Earth would barely have enough time to get ready.

No lab has yet been built that could adequately handle an alien soil sample, and such a facility is years away, according to a report released yesterday.

A robotic mission to fetch Mars rocks was initially planned to return samples by 2008. But a federally appointed research panel warned yesterday that the facility necessary to quarantine Mars rocks will take at least a decade to design and build.

The facility needed to protect Earth from even the remote possibility of a dangerous organism in the Mars sample, and to protect the sample itself from contamination, will require ''a sample-receiving quarantine and research facility unlike any other in existence,'' said John Wood, chair of a panel of the National Academy of Sciences that prepared the report, which was released yesterday at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union being held this week at the Hynes convention center.

The new facility, the report said, would have to combine the protections afforded by the highest level of biological containment facilities, called BSL-4, with the protection from outside contamination afforded by ''clean rooms'' used to process microchips. BSL-4, which stands for biological safety level 4, is used to handle deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus.

John Rummel, NASA's planetary protection officer, is responsible for protecting Earth from any alien organisms. Rummel, also responsible for protecting alien organisms from Earth contaminants, said in an interview yesterday that he was pleased with the report and plans to ''adopt some or all'' of its recommendations.

But Rummel added that he is not sure the report went far enough. Any Mars sample containing clear signs of life, the report says, would require ''a very elaborate plan of handling, curation and study,'' areas the panel did not attempt to discuss in detail.

If a sample shows signs of life, said Rummel, the level of excitement and interest among scientists and the public will be too intense to accommodate the delays involved in a new round of research and planning. Well before the samples come back to Earth, he said, NASA should have in place ''a plan of what you do if you do find life.''

Wood, a senior scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said that ''if the sample really, truly seemed to have life in it, it would become a question of such towering importance that the resources available to investigate it would become much larger.''

''We would need to completely rethink the situation in that case,'' he said.

The new report concentrates primarily on what it calls a more likely scenario: that whatever is found in the samples from Mars will be unclear, with signs that point to the possibility of living organisms, but no clear proof. In that case, it suggests that samples could be thoroughly sterilized so that some tiny parts of the alien rock or soil could be sent out for study in much less restrictive laboratories.

Inside BSL-4 facilities, researchers must work inside cumbersome ''space suits'' that severely limit what they can do, with heavy gloves that restrict their ability to manipulate the material.

It was the ongoing saga of a meteorite from Mars, which NASA researchers announced in 1996 contained evidence of possible fossilized Martian microbes, that guided the panel's recommendation for the release of sterilized samples for research, Wood said. Five years after the initial report, the question of whether the meteorite contains signs of past life or not remains unresolved and contentious.

Rummel said he thinks there should also be some additional tests for the presence of life, beyond those recommended by the panel, before the samples are presumed to be safe. The panel called for tests that assume all life will operate on the same principles as Earth life, he said, and it is too soon to make such an assumption.

''We ought to do some studies that don't depend on us knowing anything,'' he said. But overall, he said, ''the spirit of the report is right on.'' When it comes to handling Martian samples, he said, ''we should take our time to do it right.''

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/150/nation/mars_rocks_seen_coming_before_means_to_handle_the_+.shtml

Miller ^o^