A joint committee for NASA and the American government ranked the planets and other bodies in the solar system - Mars, Europa and Ganymede are places that samples coming from should be in maximum quarantine
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, governments have been making efforts to protect the Earth from any alien germ that might arrive here on a return flight of a scientific mission.
The odds of that couldn't be higher. Anything from contamination from another planet to viruses and bacteria are possible as NASA plans missions to bring samples from Mars and other bodies in the solar system in the coming years. The concern is that harmful visitors from space might enter and contaminate Earth's environment or the planet's inhabitants.
The first operation to bring such examples is in progress, this is the Stardust operation which was 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 comet's tail and bring them to Earth in 2006.
The particles will be microscopes, each of them will be able to enter the point at the end of this sentence 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.
At the end of 2002, the USA and Japan are planning to launch a spacecraft called Muses C to bring a fragment of an asteroid to Earth in 2007. While the scientists seek to find signs of life on other planets they will do everything to imprison them lest they escape. No one wants us to suffer from Andromeda Syndrome. And certainly no one wants to take the responsibility on themselves. 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. The space scientists should therefore not only worry about contamination from the earth that they might send to other planets, now there is the opposite danger - bacteria will be imported to us.
An international agreement from 1967 states that space flights must not pollute in both directions. These days, NASA is setting up an internal team to protect the planet. The committee includes 15 scientists and establishes procedures for handling samples from outer space. Working alongside it is a group of experts from other government agencies, including the Ministry of Health, Agriculture, the 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 Protection 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 (which resulted from the loss of spacecraft launched to Mars) the matter is frozen for the time being.
"The main concern is the possibility that samples that reach Earth from small objects in the solar system may carry living beings, which may harm living organisms or destroy the ecosystem," the report concludes. At the top of the list of planets suspected of having life are Mars, Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede, and several types of asteroids. The scientists doubt that carnivores or insects, or anything else that could harm man could exist on these planets, since there is no similar food source there. "Being a human pathogen (a microscopic creature that harms humans) on Mars is not such a successful business, Ramel says. "You may find hydrogen-eating creatures there, but they will not harm humans. At the bottom of the list, with little or no chance of satisfying the minimum requirement for life are places like the moon and interstellar dust particles, but still no one is taking a chance and samples from these places will be handled with care.
The Earth, and this is a known fact, is constantly bombarded with dust and rocks from comets and other bodies. Every year no less than 40 thousand tons of material fall to earth from space. The scientists estimate that at least some of this material survives the passage through the atmosphere without damage. It is known that fragments from Mars reached Earth in the form of 15 meteorites, most of which were found in remote areas in the Sahara and Antarctica. Perhaps the most famous of them, ALH 84001, a potato-like meteorite that NASA engineers announced in 1996 as containing the remains of fossilized bacteria from Mars. But this meteorite and others reached the earth the hard way alone when they cross 2 atmospheres (Mars and Earth). Some of them are displayed in museums, others are in the hands of private collectors and some of them have been studied in laboratories around the world. But contrary to that, samples that will arrive in NASA spacecraft will make the journey in a sealed box and they will land using a parachute.
Possible landing areas are the Australian desert or the Utah deserts, in the Dugway military base area, where the US military is testing samples of biological and chemical weapons. Then NASA scientists will be able to receive and test the tests in the laboratory under extreme security conditions before transferring them to their laboratory. No facility existing today can handle extraterrestrial materials. The closest thing to this was a biological materials laboratory at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, which was used to test Apollo samples, but was dismantled when the program ended in 1972. Most of the 382 kilograms of moon rocks are locked in a special laboratory at the center, immersed in liquid nitrogen to preserve them and to prevent terrestrial bacteria. contaminate them.
The new lab could be at one of three centers - the Ames Research Center in Mountain View and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (both in California) involved in planning sample return missions, or NASA could place it elsewhere. Wherever it is, the lab will meet Centers for Disease Control and Prevention standards like the one in Atlanta, Georgia, which has 4 levels of protection for scientists studying Earth's disease-causing bacteria. Samples from Mars or Europa will be handled in the most hermetic facility, similar to the highest level of protection in the Atlanta laboratory Level 4. At this level, researchers wear space suits and test samples of deadly viruses such as Ebola in specially protected cells. We have the necessary technologies for protection, so there is no problem here, says Noorin Noonan, assistant head of R&D at epa who heads the advisory team for the protection of the planet. "There are government and military facilities that work with organisms that if you make one mistake working with them you will never see the light of the sun again, and none of them have even escaped." The bigger question, Noonan says, is "to see the risks from the perspective of what are the real dangers? We have no evidence that such dangerous creatures will actually return in spacecraft bringing samples, but the whole idea of risk management is still not well understood, and the scientific community has not yet been able to explain it."
So far, NASA is trying to adopt the decisions of the group established by the National Research Agency. NASA's Planet Earth Protection Committee will meet in October to adopt a charter and create the framework for decisions regarding future space missions. "This is one of the things where the government is doing something right," says Rice from the ST Institute, which is not affiliated with NASA but works together with NASA in this area. "They took the matter seriously," she says, "I'm sure that if there was any reason why we shouldn't bring samples, the scientists would object. Luckily for us, they didn't decide that way."
