The Phoenix mission to Mars carried out the first wet experiments (with ion selective electrodes) and tentatively reported ~0.5% by weight of Martian soil to be perchlorate. This talk will explore why this is such an exciting finding and why open tubular ion chromatography is really the only way to reach a definitive conclusion about the presence of perchlorate and other oxychlorine species. Jorgenson, the father of capillary zone electrophoresis, reportedly joked about his invention: Capillary electrophoresis is a wonderful technique but it has only three small problems: Injection, Separation and Detection. In open tubular ion chromatography, a sample is injected into a conduit and a response is recorded with or without eluent suppression. In general, open tubular liquid or ion chromatography is time efficient only in very small capillaries where the Jorgenson triad of problems intensify. In recent years we have learned how to inject pL-multi-nL volumes of samples in the same setup, generate active chromatographic surfaces within capillaries as small as 5 m in bore and learned to make miniature detectors to detect analytes sensitively in such small tubes. The prospects of working meaningfully on this planet with practical inexpensive equipment (less than $1000 for a high performance chromatograph!) will also be discussed.