The planet Mars probably offered environmental conditions permitting the genesis of primitive life. Hence, several robotic Mars missions are currently underway or are in the planning stage, which either search for putative (paleo-)biological signatures or potential (subsurface) niche habitats. If fossilized or extant life is present in the water ice repositories of the planet, such as the polar caps or even recently in mid to low latitudes, it may well be of very low number density, which will require very sensitive instrumentation to identify diminutive signatures of biological activity. Therefore, these detection techniques will be vulnerable to even trace amounts of residual terrestrial biological contamination: Such a "Forward Contamination" may jeopardize the pristinity of the samples and, consequently, the scientific success of any mission from the astrobiological point of view.
In close collaboration with the Institute of Ecology at the University of Innsbruck, our research focusses on minimizing this bioload during human expeditions to Mars by studying the contamination vectors using viable biological proxies and embedding the contamination vector tracing techniques in the context of simulated surface actitivities in a Mars analogue research environment. Field expeditions are foreseen into desert areas as well as the high arctic within the framework of the PolAres programme of the Austrian Space Forum until 2011.
