re: The USSR sent several landers to Mars that were pretty much unsterilized...
Hmm, not very conclusive. Almost everything written about Soviet Mars probes in western sources is heavily slanted. Under the COSPAR protocols all these spacecraft would have been required to have some sort of sterilization. I would have thought that Mars-1 or Zond-2 might more likely candidates. I'll do some more digging. Thanks all the same.
Jon
