Robots will kill them all!

Science fiction sometimes seems to simply pick between whether it is the robots or the aliens who are going to kill us all, so it is refreshing to see a headline warning us that the robots are killing the aliens. It is actually not a particularly fear-mongering story though. Instead, it is a nice article talking about how the fact that there is has been a complete lack of any organic found on Mars is in fact odd given the likelihood of transfer by asteroids or comets. This had let scientists to speculate that the perchlorates on Mars, when heated, are destroying any organic material that may be there to find. This suggests new ways of looking for organic materials in future rovers that will not result in destroying what is being looked for. There is an interesting mix here of wanting to collect data about Mars as a new environment, but also having to make some assumptions about Mars in order to plan out and revise the data collection procedures being used there.