HMM: Report offers way to ease Mars mission planetary protection requirements. “Future Mars lander missions could adopt less stringent planetary protection requirements by landing in regions of the planet unlikely to allow any terrestrial contamination to propagate, a study concludes. The study by a National Academies committee, released Oct. 7, recommended that missions that don’t plan to go more than a meter into the surface could land across a wide range of lower latitudes of the planet unlikely to have large amounts of water ice.”