Forbidden Zones on Mars! If you go here, you're in big trouble!

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:05]Believe it or not, there are places on Mars right now where if you set foot there, you are breaking international law. I'm not kidding. NASA, the United Nations outer space treaty and Kosbar planetary protection rules all say stay the hell away. And these places are called recurring slope lineier or RSLs.

[00:00:30]Dark narrow seasonal streaks that appear on steep slopes, grow downhill like they're alive, and then just vanish.

[00:00:39]Mainstream science wants you to believe that they're just dry sand avalanches triggered by wind and dust. I don't buy it, and I'm not alone. If this is just wind and dust, then why do we need to stay away? There's a whole body of peer-reviewed research pointing to something far more explosive. Transient briny water flows, rapidly evaporating salty water seeping out, carrying hydrated salts, and probably extent Martian life. Today, we're diving deep into the science, the coverup vibes, and the mindblowing twist. If life is down there, the real danger might not be us contaminating Mars, but Martian bacteria coming back to contaminate us. This is the angry astronaut, and we're about to expose the forbidden zones of Mars.

[00:01:38]Good afternoon, alien enthusiasts, and welcome to another angry alien bulletin.

[00:01:43]This is sort of an alien story and sort of not more about Mars, about the mystery of Mars, the possible existence of life on Mars. That is to say, in the areas that we're going to be talking about today, and why it's illegal to go looking for life in some of the most promising areas imaginable. There are regions of Mars that are dominated by something called RSLs, recurring slope lineier. And what does that mean? Well, it's something that was only noticed about a decade or so ago.

[00:02:21]And that is the fact that something was in motion on the surface of Mars.

[00:02:27]Something running downhill, something that looked very much like an underground spring of some kind erupting out of the Martian regalith and spilling down steep slopes. And we've seen this over and over again across the planet.

[00:02:45]And the discoloration caused by these RSLs disappear in very short order.

[00:02:51]They're gone in almost no time at all.

[00:02:55]Which is what why lots of people came to believe that they were underground springs or water reservoirs of some kind erupting briefly running downhill for a short amount of time down very steep slopes which is about the only way this could happen before the extremely thin atmosphere cold temperatures and other conditions that don't favor liquid water on the surface of Mars would just make it all evaporate away in no time at all.

[00:03:23]In any event, that was the conclusion.

[00:03:26]That was the discovery that was supposedly made about a decade ago, that there were underground reservoirs of water. This argument was strengthened by the fact that these things were happening seasonally, only happening when the surface of Mars became a lot warmer than usual, which again fits. If there are large reservoirs of ice beneath the surface, very shallow reservoirs that is just beneath the surface and the temperature rises to a certain point, then this water would erupt. Again, it shouldn't be able to survive under the extreme vacuum, extreme cold, and other conditions that really don't contribute to liquid water surviving on the surface of Mars. But there are things about Mars, about the composition of Mars that would make certain kinds of water resilient enough to survive briefly. However, then NASA made a complaint about face and said, at least the majority of the scientific community now says that this is not water at all. That it's just sand.

[00:04:30]Somehow sand is erupting from the surface of Mars, running downhill, causing an immense discoloration, and somehow that sand just goes away in a very short amount of time. Again, I'm going to explain to you why it's very difficult for me to buy this. But more importantly, I'm going to tell you why these regions are off limits. Why NASA and actually the international community have decided that no one gets to go anywhere near these RSLs. If you do, you are in violation of international law.

[00:05:05]And then finally, I'm going to tell you why these RSLs and the life that I believe almost certainly exists there is actually a greater threat to man than we possibly could be to it.

[00:05:23]So once again, let's just start out with what RSL actually are. Discovered in 2011 by Alfred Mchuan's team using the high-rise instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These are narrow streaks anywhere from half a meter to 5 m wide and up to hundreds of meters long on slopes steeper than 25 to 40°. They form on equatorfacing walls in the southern mid latitudes about between 32° south and 48° south. Although quite a few of them also exist in the Valis Marinerys, which is much closer to the equator. They appear in late southern spring and summer when surface temperatures hit anywhere from 250 to 300° Kelvin, which is warm enough for liquid water if it's briney. In other words, full of salt. They grow incrementally, sometimes 20 m per day, and fade in colder seasons. They recur in the exact same spots year after year.

[00:06:28]Hundreds can form in one crater. They start from rocky outcrops and flow downhill, often following small channels. Some classic examples are the Palicier crater, the Horowitz crater, and as I said, many sites in the Val Marinys, this incredibly huge canyon that if we were to transpose it onto Earth, it would stretch all the way from New York to San Francisco. So, the big question is what causes them? In the original 2011 science paper by Mchuan, they proposed liquid brines near the surface. Pure water would boil off instantly in Mars thin atmosphere. But salty brines have depressed freezing points. Perclororates and chlorates, and we know that there are lots of these everywhere on Mars, can keep liquid water down to ridiculously low temperatures. Let's fast forward to 2015. Another scientist named Luhendra Oha and team hit the jackpot. Using spectrometer data, they find spectral evidence of hydrated salts right on the RSL slopes during active season.

[00:07:41]Magnesium perchlorates, sodium perchlorates, and magnesium chlorate.

[00:07:46]Exactly what they expected. These salts were hydrated when observed in the summer and the hydration signature vanished in the autumn. That is huge. It screams that briny water seeped out, flowed a bit, and then rapidly evaporated, leaving the salt deposits behind. And get this, a 2025 study by Lou at all in nature scientific reports looked at time series data from multiple Mars years. After the global dust event that took place just a few years ago on Mars, RSL activity spiked dramatically.

[00:08:25]They saw the same hydrated salt signatures in the summer data and it was absent in the autumn. This paper explicitly links this to water related activity and potential brine flows triggered or enhanced by dust deposition. So in other words, this whole debate has not been settled. No matter what space.com or anybody else might tell you, there are plenty of people who still think that this is water. And this isn't some fringe idea.

[00:08:56]Multiple independent lines of research show that the morphology, seasonality, thermal data, and direct spectral detection of hydrated perchlorates all point to transient liquid brines. Liquid water on the surface of Mars and definitely just beneath the surface of Mars. And that really increases the potential for life.

[00:09:24]Okay, so that's what RLS are and that's why I think there's still smoking gun evidence for this being some sort of liquid brine rather than some kind of dry sand phenomena. And also I think it's important that we look at the whole pattern of this discovery and compare it to other discoveries that NASA has made in the past. NASA has a tendency, a an MMO, of making extraordinary discoveries and then backing off of them. The most significant of which was the label release experiment on Viking.

[00:10:02]So, here's where I get angry. The dry dust crowd has been loud lately. A big paper authored by Bickl and Valentinis in nature communications did a global machine learning analysis of half a million slope streaks and they claim that RSL in similar features correlate better with wind speeds, dust deposition and impacts than with water or frost.

[00:10:28]They say it's all dry granular flows, dust avalanches, no liquid needed. Not really sure why dust avalanches would only happen during the summertime, but that's just one of a number of problems, but still NASA JPL put out press releases calling RSL flowing sand, not water, and the matter is now closed. But come on, this feels exactly what happened with the Viking label release experiment in 1976.

[00:11:01]Dr. Gilbert Leven's label released instrument on both landers detected clear gas release when the soil was fed nutrients. Exactly what you would expect from active microbes. The results were positive for current life. But the mainstream immediately dismissed it as nonbiological chemistry, especially after the gas chromatographs mass spectrometer didn't find organic molecules, which we now know was because perchlorates destroyed these molecules and we found organic molecules elsewhere on Mars in vast quantities. Reanalyses by Levan and others, including 2016 and later papers, show that the label release data is still consistent with microbial metabolism. And never ever has an experiment been carried out to prove that non-organic processes could have produced the same results. Yet the scientific establishment has buried it for decades. The same thing here. RSL look, act, and spectrally scream briney water. So, let's call it sand to avoid the major discovery implications for habitability and planetary protection.

[00:12:20]I'm not buying it. The brine evidence, especially the hydrated salt detections that appear and disappear seasonally, is too strong. And if there's transient liquid water, even salty and short-lived, that's a huge habitat for current Martian life.

[00:12:43]Okay, all of this having been said, why are these areas nogo zones? Why really are these RSLs forbidden regions? I mean, certainly since we don't really know what they are, since there's still actually debate, no matter who in the mainstream scientific community tells you otherwise, there's definitely mainstream debate as to what these things might be. Why is it impossible for anyone, even a rover, to go there and find out for themselves?

[00:13:18]So yeah, let's talk about why no one, no rover, and especially no human is allowed near these things. And this is where science collides headon with international law. And it gets infuriating. Under the 1967 outer space treaty signed by the United States and every other space fairing nation, Article 9 is crystal clear. Every country must prevent quote harmful contamination unquote of celestial bodies. That's not a suggestion or a guideline. It's binding international law designed to protect the scientific integrity of other worlds. And article six goes even further. Nations are required to authorize and continually supervise all non-governmental activities in space. That means that private companies like SpaceX are not free to do whatever they want. The US government is legally on the hook for anything they do on Mars. Kospar, the Committee on Space Research, turns those treaty obligations into the actual enforcable planetary protection rules that NASA, ISA, and every other agency follow. The November 2025 costbar policy update is still in force as of right now. It hasn't changed for the core classification of RSL. Mars special regions are defined as any area where the terrestrial organisms are likely to be able to replicate or where there is high potential for the existence of current Martian life. The hard scientific criteria for unlikely to replicate are precise. The temperature must be above -28° C for even a few hours. And there's water activity. Those are the two thresholds where even Earth microbes could wake up, metabolize, and start multiplying. RSL meet this uncertain or potential special region threshold precisely because of the brine hypothesis. The seasonal hydrated salt signatures, the incremental growth, the temperature range, all of it keeps them in this high-risk category even after the 2025 dry dust papers. They are not officially delisted. That means they are treated as potential special regions until proven otherwise with insitue data. And by the way, you can't get that insitu data because no one can go there.

[00:15:53]And that triggers category 4C, planetary protection, the strictest level for landers or anything that touches the surface in these zones. Under category 4 C, your entire spacecraft or at minimum, every subsystem that could possibly contact the site must be sterilized to an insanely low bio burden. less than 30 bacterial spores total across the whole system or less than 30 spores per square meter on surfaces. That's Viking level heat sterilization, baking the hardware at 110 to 125° C for hours in a sterile facility. Compare that to what these rovers got, Curiosity and Perseverance.

[00:16:40]These were only category 4A, the relaxed version for missions with no life detection experiments and no special region access. So in other words, ahead of time, it was determined that these rovers were never going to go anywhere near a location where life might actually be present. 4A allows up to 300,000 bacterial spores total on the landed system and an average of 300 spores per square meter on exposed surfaces. That's still super clean by Earth standards, but 10,000 times more permissive than category 4C. That's why neither rover has been allowed anywhere near a confirmed RSL. In 2015, orbital images spotted possible transa sharp slopes inside of Gail Crater, just within a few kilometers of Curiosity's planned path. NASA immediately rerouted the rover and kept it at a safe distance of never closer than about 2 kilometers in the official planning and treated those sites as potential special regions. Curiosity has been climbing Mount Sharp for years now and has never approached one. Perseverance's entire landing ellipse in Jezero Crater was deliberately chosen and mapped to avoid any known or potential RSL sites for planetary protection compliance. The mission planners bent over backwards to make sure the rover would never get close to these mysterious regions. Now imagine humans, forget it. You cannot sterilize an astronaut. You cannot sterilize a space suit, boots, gloves, tools, or the microscopic Earth biome riding on skin, in breath, or in sweat.

[00:18:33]Even a single unsterilized human footprint in an active RSL would constitute forward contamination on a scale that violates category 4 C. So, here's the nightmare scenario that keeps the planetary protection officers up at night. Elon Musk's Starship eventually lands near an active RSL. A private American astronaut decides to go trumping over and starts digging for samples. Technically, the United States government is now in violation of its treaty obligations because it has a legal duty to authorize and supervise that private activity. There's no interplanetary police, so no prison cell waiting on Mars. But the consequences for SpaceX would be brutal. The FAA could yank or delay future Starship launch licenses. NASA could pull or condition Artemis related contracts worth billions of dollars. And there could be massive diplomatic protests from other treaty nations throughout the United Nations. It would be a regulatory and reputational nightmare that could slow the entire Mars program to a crawl.

[00:19:44]This isn't hypothetical hand ringing.

[00:19:46]These rules are still in force in 2026, even as the dry dust narrative gains traction. Until Costar formally delists RSL based on overwhelming new evidence that will probably never exist, nobody is allowed near these things. And the forbidden zone status remains.

[00:20:13]And then finally, there's one more point that in my opinion needs to be made.

[00:20:18]NASA and the international community is so concerned about contamination, perhaps justifiably so. It's amazing how resilient some extreophile bacteria can be. In spite of our best efforts to sanitize and scrub these rovers, it's very likely that at least some bacteria, some spores survive the interplanetary journey and the inferno of re-entry into the Martian atmosphere. But in my opinion, what is far more dangerous about these RSLs and the life that I think is thriving there is the danger that they could present to us.

[00:20:59]If Martian life exists in these RSL brines, bacteria that evolved over 4 billion years in progressively worse perchlorate laced regalith under constant cosmic rays, UV temperature swings from -60° C to plus 20° C and near vacuum conditions. These organisms would be evolutionary super specialists, hyper adapted to exploit every scrap of nutrient in an ultra hostile environment. Earth extreophiles on our rovers tough sure reducing basillus strains or clean room survivors, but they didn't evolve under the full Mars gauntlet. in direct competition for the same scarce resources. The home team Martian microbes would likely clobber the invaders, out compete them, maybe even treat them as lunch. And the real danger, backward contamination, Martian bacteria hitching a ride back to Earth or into our crew habitats with biochemistry we've never seen. Novel toxins, allergens, or pathogens our immune system have zero experience with.

[00:22:13]hardy enough to survive in space suits, life support systems, or even human bodies. Costar's own 2025 to 2026 policy. Admit that for crude missions, protecting Earth and the crew from potential Martian material is now the highest priority. Humans can't be sterilized. The rules are still conservative because we don't know. If I'm right about RSL brine and life than the first human mission that ignores the law and samples one might bring back something far more dangerous than we ever sent. That's why we need dedicated life detection missions right now.

[00:22:54]Targeted at RSL with proper sterilization or sample return capability before the private rush to Mars turns these forbidden zones into tourist traps. So, what do you think?

[00:23:07]Are RSL briney water seeps hiding alien microbes in the dry dust narrative just another Viking style dismissal? Drop your hottest takes in the comments. And if you want more deep dives like this unfiltered, evidenceheavy with no corporate spin, smash that like button, subscribe, and hit the bell. And also, please support this channel on Patreon.

[00:23:31]All the details are in the description so I can keep calling it like I see it.

[00:23:36]This is the angry astronaut questioning everything so you don't have to. And until next time, stay angry about space.