NASA Still Has No Planetary Protection Policy For Humans On Mars
Report: Review and Assessment of Planetary Protection Policy Development Processes
“Planetary protection policies are facing unprecedented challenges as NASA and other national and international space agencies move forward on missions such as Mars Sample Return and exploration campaigns to the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn. NASA also does not currently have a planetary protection policy in place regarding human exploration to Mars, which could take place in the 2030s. Moreover, the current U.S. government process to oversee samples returned from Mars and elsewhere dates back to the Apollo era and is out of date. The committee recommended that NASA’s agency-wide planetary protection strategic plan prepare for the policy development challenges that sample return and human missions to Mars are creating, as well as revise or replace its provisions for engaging relevant federal agencies in developing protection policies for returned samples.”
As Space Becomes a Busy Place, NASA Bolsters Its Planet-Contamination Police
“[NASA PLanetary Protection Officer Lisa] Pratt’s debut comes just as NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection itself goes through a more profound transition. Back in July 2017 NASA announced the office was being transferred from the Science Mission Directorate to NASA’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance in Washington, D.C. That move, agency officials said, will inject more engineering rigor into the biological contamination control for outbound and inbound planetary spacecraft.”
It seems kind of pointless to come up with a planetary protection policy for human exploration of Mars when we’re probably at least two decades away from it (*insert joke about Mars human missions always being two decades away*). Once we have hardware and are in the serious early planning phases for such a mission, we can come up with the requirements.
“Wired” covered the story by pointing out that changing technology requires updates or revisions to policies that aim to limit, as they phrase it, human “cooties” on Mars. It’s a fair point. How do you formulate a policy general enough to gain consensus but specific enough to actually work?
The way things go two decades could be required to reach some sort of policy.
Unfortunately, planetary protection rules would have a major impact on the hardware. The design of the landers, habitats, etc. all depend on how strenuously they have to reduce forward contamination. Even hardware which remains in orbit could be affected. If it’s the propulsion stage which transported the lander to Mars, there might be a requirement not to recontaminate the outside of the lander during the trip. The Viking landers, for example were put inside a “bioshield” to prevent recontamination from the less strenuously sterilized orbiters. That makes it hard to get to “once we have hardware” without coming up with planetary protection requirements.
This is why that the goal should be to send humans to the Martian Moons first, establish a base on one of them and then use it to search for life. This would be a good compromise as you have easy access to surface samples and high bandwidth VR for surface robotics, but you are able to keep humans off planet until you figure out how to protect it, and prevent any contamination from also reaching Earth as well. This is the key problem with doing planetary protection, trying to determine what you are protecting.
The way things are going I’m guessing 3 to 4 decades if even then.
Otherwise, such policy should only protect for good science results and not affect human missions if proper goals are established.
Unless the Moon mission tech turns out to be very useful for Mars missions, that seems likely. I’m skeptical we’ll see a crewed Mars mission from NASA this side of 2050 – a private mission (however unlikely that is) is probably more likely than that.
Mars planetary protection for human missions is a difficult problem. It seems likely that some areas will be cleared for human landings while large parts of Mars will be off-limits (“wilderness areas”). How do we decide which areas will be cleared for human landings, and how they will be certified? What precursor missions are needed for this? These decisions can not be made just a few years before the first human mission lands on Mars.
The sensible answer may not please people. I’d say areas cleared for less restrictive protection (zoned for human use, if you like) could be identified by the exact opposite of the current site selection process (for unmanned landers.) There is a process for selecting the most scientifically interesting sites for landers, in terms of studying things like potential habitability, and they have gone through it about ten times already. Just turn that process on its head and use it to identify the _least_ scientifically interesting sites. Or perhaps least interesting for astrobiology (e.g. a dead site with fantastic potential for volcanology wouldn’t be a problem.)
Unfortunately, there is the question about precursor missions. From a planetary protection point of view, if we’re going to zone areas for human use, we really ought to send unmanned landers or rovers to those sites and verify that they really are uninteresting. That’s what some people will be unhappy about. It amounts to carefully and deliberately sending missions to the places were we are _least_ likely to learn something.
Your suggestion to go to uninteresting sites is a bit harsh. There is a great to deal to learn about Mars that has nothing to do with its current ability to support human or terrestrial biota. Not only geology, but also evidence for past habitability. As a perhaps trivial example, most of the places where we find fossils on Earth are not very habitable (e.g., deserts) for most creatures.
I didn’t mean to sound that way. But consider what we are basically talking. First, select sites which have the minimum potential for past or extant life, and which have minimum potential for survivability of terrestrial life. Then send precursor missions there to confirm a lack of habitability and potential for past or extant life. I include past life, because some people could raise concerns about dead, terrestrial microbes giving a false positive for trace evidence of past, martian life.
The precursor missions would, in effect, be designed to search for something we don’t want them to find and sent to sites where we don’t expect them to find it. The precursors are to confirm the absence of anything forward contamination could affect. There will be people who think there are better uses for a Mars lander.
Those precursor missions would be a great way to help fund commercial providers. You could also add in experiments and research on ISRU to help develop the technology needed for humans on Mars. Basically you would then have two lander/rover programs. The current science driven one focused on the search for life and a commercial one focused on searching for settlement sites for a future Mars Village.
That’s a nice idea, and it could work. But I’m not sure about the motives of the people involved. To clear a site for human occupation, you’d want some good planetary scientists and biologists involved. Their job would be to _not_ make the discovery of the century. Finding life on Mars would be an automatic Nobel prize; conclusively disproving it in a particular location might not even make the local newspaper. So how would we attract the necessary talent?
I would hope that there would be some scientists out there who would be motivated by the search for knowledge and not for glory but perhaps that is naive. But to be honest, if Mars has life it will probably be everywhere.The concentrations may be different in different locations just as on Earth, but given the wind on Mars and dust storms you will probably find at least a few species even in the “uninhabitable” zones. So those scientists would still have a chance of finding it, indeed, perhaps even a better chance as they will be looking for it directly and not just exploring the “conditions” for life as NASA has been since the Viking days.
It’s not so much an interest in glory over knowledge (although some scientists certainly like getting the pictures on the front page…) But, given the choice, what sounds better: Discovering life on Enceladus or not discovering life on Mars? From beginning to end, either one could easily be a decade of someone’s career.
This also affects plans for future missions. There is a perception that Viking was a failure because it did not detect life. That colors the goals of current Mars missions, with the focus on identifying “conditions” for habitability. Those sorts of goals are achievable and not likely to produce a failure, or even the impression of a failure. This was also something the Europa lander science definition team worried about. No one wants to end up reporting that after spending a few billion dollars, the answer is a resounding, “we still don’t know.”
I wonder though about the ubiquity of life on Earth, which appears (from a sample of one) to be a characteristic of life.
That is: on Earth life is just about everywhere. This pervasiveness is a defining point.
Oh, dear. I’m talking myself into a circle.
But what I mean is this: do we imagine a situation in which life one some planet or planetoid is “just barely hanging on”- and hence hard to find?
A compromise might be one of the existing sites with ground truth; Ares Vallis might be interesting since there is a huge collection of rocks from the ancient flood(s) that human geologists would be good scanning.
Mars Pathfinder was a fine mission, but it wasn’t a life detection mission. If the idea of a precursor mission is say, “no life here, it’s an ok spot to land astronauts,” then we don’t have ground truth on Ares Vallis. I guess that was my point: The precursor missions would have to be life detection platforms, sent to Mars with the goal of failing to detect life. I can’t see enthusiasm for spending a billion dollars to _not_ discover life.
“I can’t see enthusiasm for spending a billion dollars to _not_ discover life”
Which accurately describes Mars/Saturn/Jupiter research to date?
The problem is even worse. If crew crash then their contaminated cabin contents will be spread via the Mars wind to areas far from the crash site. Alternately, wind can blow Martian microbes from an interesting location to an uninteresting Martian base. I don’t us ever finding a pure solution. We’ll forever be dealing with uncertainties. If Mars is to be settled in any way, we’ll just have to roll the dice.
“We’ll forever be dealing with uncertainties”
Maybe, maybe not; but we can, through logical and probably small steps, slowly expand the radius of research, reducing by each step the opportunity of spoiling the natives while at the same time learning something.
I’m fairly comfortable dealing with uncertainties. It’s inherent to science (and, at a more philosophical level, live in general.) Perhaps that’s the whole problem with planetary protection. It’s discussed in terms of absolutes (don’t do it) where absolutes aren’t possible. And that’s followed by requirements to come as close to the unachievable goal as possible. Maybe we could benefit from a discussion about what is good enough but not perfect, and then trying to do that.
Something tells me that “sterilizing” hardware for eventual use on/at Mars is the least of the problem. Avoid contamination while humans are actually there and out and about is going to be a bigger issue.
I doubt that it is even possible for humans to live on Mars without transferring terrestrial organisms to the local environment; we each harbor billions of them. The surface is pretty hostile, but it’s possible Earth organisms could survive underground. Ideally we should establish the absence of native life first. Once humans are there, terrestrial micro-orgnisms will be there, and all bets for spotting native life will be off.
Two errors: 1) It’s practically impossible to establish the absence of native life. How many potential niche locations are there on Mars? When will we have explore the last one? 2) If Mars has life of independent origin or common origin but of distant separation then analysis would show them to be very different from Earth life. e.g. Through genetic analysis we can determine how long two species have been separated in time. Also, the odds that crew contaminating Mars would immediately erase all traces of all Mars life seems unreasonable.
Belatedly,
Three errors:
If you’ve excluded the areas with the highest probability of life (according to the current Planetary Protection protocols for Mars), then it means that Mars life isn’t spreading. That makes it less likely that alien (Earth) bacteria will spread into unexplored niches, like deep aquifers, even if humans land on Mars.
And it says that they last separated x-trillion generations ago. What does that tell you? We’re still finding new types of single-celled life on Earth that separated from the rest back near the earliest life. A high-atmosphere extremophile/prokaryote that hitches a ride on the lander during launch would be potentially indistinguishable from Mars life that calved off Earth (or vice-versa.) Because…
That isn’t the concern. The concern is that once you contaminate Mars with Earth life, you make it orders of magnitude harder to rule out contamination from any “discovery” of native Martian life. Given the value of the discovery to science, the least we can do is make a reasonable attempt at having a proper look before we dirty the place up with faeces-throwing monkeys.
Even if NASA were to come up with some sort of policy, would it be worth the paper it is printed on? It would, after all, be a NASA policy. And we now know there are many players capable of launching missions to Mars besides NASA. The ESA has had some successful Mars orbiters and some failed landers, India launched a Mars orbiter, and SpaceX put a CAR into a potentially Mars-intersecting solar orbit. Japan and the Soviet Union/Russia also had some failed Mars missions. None of these parties would be obliged to abide by a NASA directive.
No, but it could be a starting point for discussions and perhaps agreement on the standards to follow.
Mr. Musk’s car wasn’t in a “potentially Mars-intersecting solar orbit”; someone’s even published a paper on the subject of its orbit and potential fate.
And you might want to add the United Arab Emirates to you list. Their Al Amal mission on track to launch to Mars in 2020.
But that’s largely irrelevant. I’m fairly sure all those nations signed the Outer Space Treaty, and agreed to let COSPAR interpret of the contamination clauses. That’s still a bit vague. But having a major space agency set a more specific policy helps. Other nations may simply decide to go along with it, instead of investing time, effort and money into coming up with their own rules. They are, after all, committed to having some sort of rules which comply with the treaty.
Seems to me a major omission from Planetary Protection Policy discussion is the cost-benefit analysis, what is the cost to a Human to Mars mission by enacting a specific policy, versus the cost of separating out the contamination via technological means? If a policy requires $100B modification to Mars mission, but the contamination it prevents can be resolved by using $1,000 DNA sequencer or a $1M scanning electron microscope, then it is a very bad policy.
That’s a systematic problem with the way NASA does business. The whole approach is based on identifying goals and then handing the problem off to the engineers to make it happen. There really isn’t much place for feedback, and that’s what a meaningful cost-benefit analysis requires.
Could this process – you are surely among the most qualified to characterize it – could this process be nothing more than a symptom of a very immature space program, one that will, over the course of many decades/ centuries, settle into more efficacious systems?
It’s quite possible. The logic behind going from goals to requirements to hardware is, I think, originally based on space missions being rare and expensive. If it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity, you wouldn’t want to do a second-rate job by flying cheap instruments. Which makes a certain amount of sense. But it’s also a self-fulfilling prophecy if you take it too far. I think the approach may shift if launch costs go down and flight opportunities become more common.
NASA shows no evidence of any serious plan or capacity to put humans on Mars in either the short or long term. Better asking China or SpaceX!
Look, if you are going to explore Mars, explore Mars and get on with it. First determine the hazards to humans, then find appropriate mitigations,then determine how to avoid back contamination of Earth, then go! Don’t fence off the most interesting areas.
One cannot practically determine the biologic risks to crew because we don’t know what biology, if any, exists on Mars. Likewise, we don’t know how any theoretical Martian microbe would interact with the tens of millions of known species on Earth. And we cannot ethically require that all crew and craft only go one way to Mars. So one can never eliminate the back contamination concern. Ultimately it comes down to a question of whether we should just roll the dice given the uncertain probabilities and uncertain impacts involved.
Actually, that’s another inconsistency in NASA’s Mars plans. Back contamination would be a serious issue for a Mars sample return mission. NASA is putting quite a bit of time and effort into the sample return. As far as I can tell, quite a bit more effort is going into sky cranes and precision landing, and very little into back contamination issues.
Lunacy: obviating what is perhaps the most interesting question in science in the name of expediency.
The issue i have here is that it is no ones interest to have such a policy in place. bKeep things relatively virgin….
I would be more worried if there was a policy in place as it would mean restrictions in what may be planned/achievable. I also fear that if such a document is formulated, it will be a push from “old space” to form it in such a way as to restrict/kill “new space”.
There is a lot going on in the community. There are new approaches for the ice moons, because this looks more urgent than the manned missions to Mars. Most of the people within planetary protection are scientists themselves and they want to have a mission but also to preserve the location for further science. The regulations are changing with time and improved knowledge of the solar system a few places have been upgraded to places of interest and for others the requirements were changed.
With SpaceX and the interest in colonization of Mars which is not a science question at all the PP is more important than ever. SpaceX has no need to do planetary protection, it is forced to do it by COSPAR and NASA.
There have been several conferences on Mars Sample Return in the last decade. All of them included presentations from NASA and ESA on how to implement and facilitate the samples when they are back. To say that the protocols “dates back to the Apollo era” is not true. They are based on the lessons learned from that time. A huge amount of work was put into the development of concepts for curation and work on mars samples. They are not active protocols yet, because there is no mars sample return mission in a phase credible enough to get funding for this. I work in this field for a decade now and what I see: If there is a MSR mission it would be easy to get all the important people together and have that drafted protocols put on a table.
That’s not quite what the National Academies report says. For example:
Mars 2010 hasn’t been as smooth as you imply. Apparently they made some decisions, such as using MSL heritage designs to reduce costs, before the Planetary Protection Office was involved . Then it turned out the sterilization techniques PPO wanted would also damage MSL-heritage hardware. The impression I get reading the report is that they thought things could have been handled better, and should be in the future.
The report also specifically mentioned the standard of a one-in-10,000 risk of placing any microbes in a liquid water environment. They said that was based on guesses made in the 1960s. They also discussed life detection techniques used in extreme environments on Earth, and said this sort of work could and should be applied to assaying how well sterilized a spacecraft is, as well as for life detection on other planets.
And the mentioned the size of the exobiology science community and relatively small number of them who participate in planetary planetary protection meetings and workshops. Apparently far more people in the field are interested in the science than the programatic issues and practical work involved in planetary protection. (I can appreciate that; at a conference next week, I’ll be reminding people who study planetary magnetospheres that the really do need to show up for programatic meetings. So astrobiology isn’t the only specialty with this problems…)
Finally, neither COSPAR nor NASA can force private companies to follow any particular planetary protection rules. As the report discusses, COSPAR is an advisory group with no legally binding authority. NASA and the US government follow COSPAR rules because they chose to do so (and because most of those rules are recommended based on input from US scientists.) NASA has no regulatory authority. So they can’t impose and enforce rules on private companies. There is, as the report describes it, a “regulatory gap.” The Outer Space Treaty requires the US government to “authorize and continually supervise” space activities to assure compliance. But when it comes to private efforts, no US government agency is legally authorized to do so, let along funded to do so. The report considered that a problem which needed to be resolved by congressional action.