6. Despite all the media hype about trying to find life on Mars, NASA decided against the recommendation of several experts, not to bring life-detection equipment and instead focused merely on finding water. As University of Sheffield professor Dr. Milton Wainwright pointed out: "A few years ago a power struggle ensued at NASA which was won by the chemists and geologists who wanted to 'search for the water' instead of trying directly to detect life on Mars. Some amazing data will doubtless be provided by Phoenix, but at the risk of being accused of being churlish, can I point out that the absence of life-detection systems on this lander represents the greatest missed opportunity in the history of mankind to date."

Parts of the CESS/TBGRI report were supported by Dr. Milton Wainwright at Sheffield University, who, together with Chandra Wickramasinghe, has studied stratospheric spores.[1][21] In March 2006 Wainwright said the particles were similar in appearance to spores of a rust fungus,[22] later saying that he had confirmed the presence of DNA,[23] and reported their similarity to algal spores, and found no evidence to suggest that the rain contained dust, sand, fat globules, or blood. In November 2012, Dr. Rajkumar Gangappa and Dr. Stuart Hogg from the University of Glamorgan, UK, confirmed that the red rain cells from Kerala contain DNA.[24]