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posted by mrpg on Saturday February 24 2018, @11:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the sounds-like-a-sci-fi-movie-plot dept.

NASA's Planetary Protection Officer has suggested that it's time to contaminate Mars slightly aggressively before humans arrive with their microbiomes in tow:

Is there life on the surface of Mars? The clock is ticking on scientists' window to solve that long-standing question before astronauts—and the microbes that live on them—contaminate the planet. Today, at a meeting in Washington, D.C., of NASA's planetary science advisory committee, the agency's new planetary protection officer raised the possibility of opening up a few of the planet's most promising regions to more aggressive exploration.

Just a few weeks into the job, Lisa Pratt, formerly a geomicrobiologist at Indiana University in Bloomington, has signaled that she wants the office to be open to the notion that a degree of contamination might be necessary to explore several of the planet's most habitable spots. Previously, the office has served as a watchdog to prevent the contamination of Mars and other planets with microbes from Earth, and vice versa. But now, time is pressing, given NASA's long-term goals, Pratt says. "No matter what we do, the minute we've got humans in the area we've got a less pristine, less clean state," Pratt said at the meeting. "Let's hope we know before the humans get there, one way or the other, if there is an ecosystem at or near the surface."

Although no region of Mars is banned for exploration, international treaties set the allowable levels of microbial contamination on robotic spacecraft destined for other planetary environments. Some scientists say it is too costly to meet the sterilization requirements to explore the potentially warm and wet "special regions" on Mars that are most likely to harbor microbes. Only the 1970s Viking landers achieved the cleanliness necessary to explore a special region. A growing number of scientists have argued that the agency needs to rethink its plans, as Science reported last year.

Related 2013 paper: The overprotection of Mars (DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1866) (DX)

Previously: NASA Posts Planetary Protection Officer Job Position


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday February 24 2018, @05:01PM (9 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday February 24 2018, @05:01PM (#643074) Journal

    Not even close:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection#Decontamination_procedures [wikipedia.org]

    the Viking spacecraft were heat-treated for 30 hours at 125°C (five hours at 125 °C was considered enough to reduce the population tenfold even for enclosed parts of the spacecraft, so this was enough for a million-fold reduction of the originally low population).

    Modern materials however are often not designed to handle such temperatures, especially since modern spacecraft often use "commercial off the shelf" components. Problems encountered include nanoscale features only a few atoms thick, plastic packaging, and conductive epoxy attachment methods. Also many instrument sensors cannot be exposed to high temperature, and high temperature can interfere with critical alignments of instruments.

    125 Celsius (°C) = 257 Fahrenheit (°F)

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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday February 24 2018, @05:27PM (4 children)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 24 2018, @05:27PM (#643088) Journal

    125 Celsius (°C) = 257 Fahrenheit (°F)

    That's hotter, but not by too much, than the temperature that people use to make beef jerky. ("Jerked" meat is dried raw meat, usually additionally preserved with salt.) For comparison.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2018, @07:16PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2018, @07:16PM (#643130)

      It's a bit more than a +15 psi pressure cooker (121 °C/250 °F), but without the pressure or steam obviously.

      • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday February 24 2018, @07:27PM (2 children)

        by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 24 2018, @07:27PM (#643140) Journal

        That's hotter [than] people use to make beef jerky...

        It's a bit more than a +15 psi pressure cooker

        These, I submit to the reader, are much better units of measure than elephants, school buses, libraries of congress, and sheets of double-spaced typed paper.

        • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday February 24 2018, @08:35PM (1 child)

          by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Saturday February 24 2018, @08:35PM (#643160) Homepage Journal

          asdjnsad as;ljcnaskl; sdacnm;.kj

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          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2018, @08:44PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2018, @08:44PM (#643166)

            You've got at least one metric fuckton of anecdotes and tidbits, but their accuracy is questionable.

            -t

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25 2018, @06:27AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25 2018, @06:27AM (#643361)
    125°C = 398 K, pretty damn close to 400, no?
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25 2018, @07:34AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25 2018, @07:34AM (#643372)
    And yet there are extremophiles [wikipedia.org] that can survive being baked to even higher temperatures. Strain 121 will not grow at 130°C, but it will not kill them either.
    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday February 25 2018, @07:36PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday February 25 2018, @07:36PM (#643537) Journal

      Strain 121 was discovered decades after the Viking program ended. It's also unclear to me that Strain 121 or 116 are successful enough outside of their wet, hydrogen-carbon dioxide rich environments to be found on the surface of the latest spacecraft we want to sterilize. In other words, if we send a spacecraft or can some tomatoes using a pressure cooker, it won't actually have Strain 121 in it, even though it *could*.

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