While the clamoring to bring bits and pieces of Mars back to Earth for intensive study continues, scientists are also devising instruments and techniques that can be sent to the Red Planet to perform on-the-spot probes for life. Could these low-cost approaches usurp the early need for samples shot directly from Mars?
That option brings to mind the comment from Marcel Proust — a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist who wrote the novel In Search of Lost Time: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." For the discovery of prior life on Mars, a sample return program would work best, but if we want to discover present-day life on the Red Planet, doing so with instruments right there on Mars is the way to go.
