Thank you for your reply.

I would have thought as much. As the composition of the fuel of the retrorockets is known, all that needs to be done
is if there is touchdown contamination, just deduct those readings from the total. What is left, is obviously martian.

Relly, that is where a air bag landing would be better, but of course the reach of the arm is given the reason not to use them in this case.

I do not see this contamination issue, being such a big deal.

However, this does not dent my enthusiasm for this mission one bit.

Andrew Brown.

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"I suddenly noticed an anomaly to the left of Io, just off the rim of that world. It was extremely large with respect to the overall size of Io and crescent shaped. It seemed unbelievable that something that big had not been visible before". Linda Morabito on discovering that the Jupiter moon Io was volcanically active. Friday 9th March 1979.