In the printed version of the Commentary 'Abandoned frontier' (Nature Geosci. 6, 155–156; 2013), a disclaimer should have been included and the author affiliation should have read “Paul O. Hayne can be reached at...”. Further, in the paragraph beginning “A public outcry...”, two phrases should have read as follows: “NASA now proposes to launch another Mars rover...” and “...whether the new mission would include the sample-caching...”. This is all correct in the PDF and HTML versions.