Flash Report: The search for extra-terrestrial genomes

Although we are non even close to April Fools' Day, I found quite unbelievable that Craig Venter and Jonathan Rothberg, founder of Ion Torrent, are independently developing a DNA sequencing machine to be delivered to Mars to search for life.
You can have additional details about this almost unbelievable project from this Technology Review article.
By the way, I didn't know of the existence of a NASA-funded project at Harvard and MIT called SET-G, or "the search for extra-terrestrial genomes.