This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagliata.

The Curiosity rover was never fully sterilized before it touched down on Mars.

And there's been debate whether the rover drill might

contaminate certain subsurface areas thought to potentially harbor life. But it

turns out the rover may not need to physically drive somewhere to pollute

that spot with Earth's microbes, because if there are any tiny earthlings on

the rover, the strong winds on Mars might be able to spread them around the red planet

instead.

Wind storms are very common on Mars even at the planetary scale.

So you have one point of contamination

given the proper condition.

You could disperse whatever you were carrying there to distant places.

Armando Asuubustos, a research scientist at the Center for Astrobiology

at the Superior Council of Scientific Research in Spain.

Asuabustos is now more certain that such spread might be possible because of an experiment

his team carried out in Chile's Atacama Desert, the conditions of which make it a popular

Mars analog.

There his team placed Petri dishes along two paths

cutting from the coast into the driest parts of the Adakama. One path was

30 miles long, the other 40 miles long, and they waited for winds to deliver coastal dust to the Petri dishes.

Then they grew whatever landed.

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