Water on Mars
September 27, 2012
NASA’s Curiosity Rover found evidence that water rushed across a Martian stream bed. The pebbled ground bears remarkable resemblance to a dried stream bed on Earth. Can buried bacilli be far behind?
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Ultraphyte 
The quality of these photos is just ridiculous. Beautiful and exciting!
My space-related news-alert gave me details on this Thursday–ain’t it cool? Now the question uppermost in my mind is–how long ago? Was the guy who first called them ‘canals’ actually looking at water?–Or is it one of those ‘millions of years ago’ type things?
You sound like you think bacteria can be found in these ‘riverbeds’–is that true? Are they tiny fossils shaped like bacteria or are they the actual organic molecules mixed in with the dirt? I hope you’re not saying that DNA could be recovered–that sounds too much like the beginning of a really gross ‘Species’-type horror-flic!
It’s probably “millions of years ago” given that Mars has about 1/3 the escape velocity of Earth, a fraction of the partial pressure, and is outside the “Goldilocks zone”.
As for transferring “Martian DNA” back to Earth, we need to land a much more sophisticated analytical robot than we’ve managed so far or achieve our first “return mission”.