You and your brainwashed Mars Society clones are living in a complete fantasy world. There is nothing at the ICAMSR website that isn't supported by rational planetary protection policies. Humans cannot go to Mars because of the contamination hazard they pose.

Here for your education and (Mary Anne's): From the MECA instrument website:

"The Mars Environmental Compatibility Assessment (MECA) Project will characterize the Martian dust and soil, identify undesirable and harmful interactions with human explorers and associated hardware systems, and support the design of extravehicular activities and habitation systems

MECA will identify hazardous substances that may emanate from Martian soil when exposed to water in a human habitat. MECA will determine the sizes and shapes of particles that adhere to representative surfaces, and will determine why they may constitute a threat to human explorers. MECA will perform experiments to learn about adhesion, abrasion, and the electrostatic behavior of particles on Mars.

MECA uses an integrated set of 4 instruments to do its job. These instruments perform experiments and observations which will be used to meet the MECA science objectives . A robot arm located on the Lander is used to scoop Martian soil from the surface for processing by the instruments.

At the conclusion of the mission, the MECA science team will recommend to NASA procedures to be followed to ensure astronaut safety on Mars, and recipes for simulating Martian soil on earth."

Since the MECA package is slated to fly on Phoenix in 2007, it doesn't look like your 100 billion dollar manned Mars mission is going to happen none too soon. The technology to keep humans alive for such a lenghty mission does not yet exist!

On the subject of fear mongering. Have you read the following document from NASA? Does the Mars Soceity refer to it in anyway? There is a difference between telling people about planetary protection protocols and concerns and fear mongering. That is your Mars Society propaganda coming through.

A Draft Test Protocol for Detecting Possible Biohazards in Martian Samples Returned to Earth (NASA/CP 2002-211842)

http://spacescience.nasa.gov/admin/pubs/marssamples/index.htm

Regarding the Mars Society itself - You all seem in complete denial about what life on Mars might mean for your "flags and footprints" mission to Mars. Fact is, astronauts aren't needed to go to Mars for science purposes, and this automatically will kill your colonization plans in todays economy. Unless some sort of economic miracle occurs, I would say we are least one or two hundred years from seeing humans on the surface of Mars, and that is if society can survive for that long.

BD