The foreboding news about the Stardust and Yabusa promotions
It sounds like science fiction, a robotic spaceship flies to another planet, digs into its soil and brings a sample back to Earth. Microscopic living creatures may sneak into this ash, which will then run amok and cause plagues on Earth. The scenario seems far-fetched, but you should know that since the Apollo flights in the XNUMXs, an effort has been made to protect the Earth from any alien germ that might arrive here on a return flight of a scientific mission.
NASA is planning missions to bring samples from Mars and other bodies in the solar system in the coming years. The first operation to bring such examples is in progress, it is the Stradust operation launched at the beginning of 1999. It is supposed to approach the comet Wild 2, which is 800 million km from Earth. The spacecraft is planned to collect particles from the tail of the comet and bring them to Earth in 2006. The particles will be microscopic, and almost certainly will not contain signs of life.
But other missions to bring soil samples from Mars or Jupiter's moon Europa, where even microscopic life has a better chance. Other options for sending probes to collect samples are Venus and the tails of another comet. In late 2002, the US and Japan plan to launch a spacecraft called Muses C to bring an asteroid fragment to Earth in 2007. *
If there are living things in the samples brought back from Mars, you wouldn't want them to get loose, says Margaret Rice RACE biologist of the ST Institute in Mountain View, California. which claims that transferring viruses to a new place can create an epidemic.
NASA has established an internal team to protect the planet. The committee includes 15 scientists and establishes procedures for handling samples from outer space. Working alongside her is a group of experts from other government agencies, including the Ministry of Health, Agriculture, Interior, Energy and the Federal Environmental Agency EPA. We intend to be conservative in the experiments we approve, says John Rummel, Director of the Earth Defense Program at NASA. About two years ago, the committee ranked the objects in the solar system according to their potential for life and made recommendations regarding the treatment of materials coming from them. The committee approved the task of bringing samples from Mars, but due to other problems ((resulting from the loss of spacecraft launched to Mars) the issue is frozen for the time being. Mars and Jupiter's moons Ganymede and Europa are at the top of the list, and at the bottom are the moon, comets and asteroids.
* Stardust returned safely to Earth while Yabusa will wait in space until 2010, when it is not certain that she even managed to collect a sample of material from the asteroid.
