[sgt101]

>But what puzzles me is why we have never followed up with any further experiments to try and detect life?

simples.

If life is definitively detected on Mars there will never be another mission to determine if life is present on Mars. So what clever scientists have figured out is that they need to do all the science that they want before checking for life.

[dotnet00]

I feel like if life was definitively detected on Mars, it'd kick off a serious new space race for sending crew there. The prestige of either potentially studying alien life, or of having the ability to set foot on the fundamental origin of life on our own planet would be even more historically significant than Apollo.

[Qem]

> I feel like if life was definitively detected on Mars, it'd kick off a serious new space race for sending crew there.

Nope. More probable for it to get quarantined, for fear of cross contamination. IIRC NASA purposefully doesn't land craft on the locations with conditions closer to habitability in Mars today, fearing stowaway microbes from our probes run amok and eradicate any extant martian biota, just like rabbits and other critters brought by Europeans wrecked ecosystems in Australia.

[dotnet00]

IIRC a big part of Perseverance's mission is to stash away pristine, provably untouched samples of Mars, because NASA sees a human landing on Mars in the nearish (ie 20-30 years) as an inevitability.

I don't think they'd quarantine the planet due to it, even moreso because even if the US decides to quarantine it, other nations might not and even then, there'd be value to sending a crew to say, a station in Mars orbit or on Phobos/Deimos, for more effective control over survey vehicles and to reduce the feedback loop between retrieving samples from the surface and studying them.