We’re Constantly Battling Invasive Species Here on Earth. What Does That Teach us About Infecting Other Worlds With Earth Life?

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We’re Constantly Battling Invasive Species Here on Earth. What Does That Teach us About Infecting Other Worlds With Earth Life?

Nov 21, 2021

When Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins returned from the Moon in the summer of 1969, they spent three weeks isolated in quarantine to make sure that they hadn’t brought back any microbial lifeforms from the Moon, which could prove harmful to Earth life. Later, once the Moon had been unequivocally proved to be a dead world, future Apollo missions were allowed to skip quarantine. Elsewhere in the solar system, however, NASA still has to take planetary biosecurity seriously, because life could be out there. If we bring it back to Earth, it could be a danger to us and our ecosystems. Conversely, microbial Earth life could invade a fragile alien ecosystem, destroying a newly discovered lifeform before we have the chance to study it. Imagine discovering life on Mars, only to realize that it was life we had brought there with us.

https://www.universetoday.com/153380...th-earth-life/

[Ray Allan]

In the case of Mars, all NASA probes starting with Viking were sterilized for this reason. The 1971 Soviet landers Mars 2, which crashed and Mars 3 which landed, but returned no data, were not sterilized as far as I know. The Galileo Jupiter orbiter and Cassini Saturn orbiter were intentionally plunged into those planets' atmospheres at the end of their missions to prevent possible contamination of the Jovian moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus, both of which could contain a liquid ocean under their ice shells and microbial life. This could be a problem whenever humans make it to these worlds.

[Nikola Bijeliti]

Here's a photograph I took a few years ago on a visit to JPL of the clean room where they build interplanetary probes in a sterile environment. I was standing in the visitor's gallery behind an air-tight pane of glass when I took the photo.