Hello and welcome to the space policy edition of Planetary Radio.

I'm Casey Dreyer, the chief of space policy here at the Planetary Society.

Welcome to the show where we look into the processes and politics and policies behind the

decisions we make in space exploration.

This month, I really had fun looking into a historical example

that I think is somewhat relevant to our situation now.

And I drilled down into a particular event.

A little bit of context as necessary before we get into that.

The announcement of the Allen Hills Meteorite Discovery in 1996,

where a paper and its authors argued that they had found evidence for past Martian life. Some of you

may remember this. It was a big deal at the time and got a ton of news coverage for what it claimed to do.

Obviously, we have not seen follow-ups in that in the sense that the paper was claims were proven

incorrect, but the outcome is often associated with a massive increase in attention towards

Mars exploration and robotic exploration.

Some arguing that it actually led to the explosion, the golden era of Mars exploration that we

had for the last 25 years, seeing a mission nearly every Mars launch opportunity, multiple

rovers, multiple orbiters, a fleet of spacecraft now at

Mars, thanks to that humble rock.

Alan Hills was on my mind a lot this last month because of a new paper that came out in the

journal Nature.

This paper basically said that there is likely a potential biosignature in the sample

cache of the Perseverance Rover currently operating on Mars, the first step of the

...