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LONG BEACH, Calif .– Future lander missions to Mars could adopt less stringent planetary protection requirements by landing in areas of the planet unlikely to allow earth contamination to spread, a study finds.
The study by a committee of the national academies, released on October 7, recommended that missions that do not plan to go more than a meter into the surface can land in a wide range of lower latitudes on the planet, unlikely to have large amounts of water ice. .
“The committee’s findings may lead to making parts of Mars more accessible to commercial and government enterprises by relaxing planetary protection requirements while remaining cautious about accessing potential habitable areas,” Amanda Hendrix, senior scientist at Planetary Science Institute and committee co-chair, said at a press conference at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences, scheduled for the report’s release.
NASA tasked the National Academies to conduct the study in response to a recommendation in a 2019 report from an independent review panel. This report recommended that NASA consider reclassifying the Moon and Mars regions to reduce the requirements of these missions while limiting the risk of contamination to materials that may contain evidence of past or present life.
“We want to avoid harmful contamination to preserve future life-sensing experiments on Mars,” Hendrix said.
The committee looked at the factors that affect the survivability and transportability of all terrestrial life that reached Mars. The cold, dry conditions of the surface, along with the galactic ultraviolet (UV) and cosmic radiation bombarding it, make it inhospitable. “The surface environment is very biocidal, mainly because of UV,” she said in an Oct. 7 webinar hosted by the National Academies.
The concern is with the transport of any land contamination below the surface, where it would be shielded from radiation and could access groundwater, potentially in an interconnected network that would allow life to spread.
The committee concluded that this risk is mitigated if spacecraft operate in the top meter of the surface in areas that have only patchy deposits of water ice or none at all. The one-meter limit, she noted in the webinar, is based on limited groundwater ice mapping data.
This would allow missions following reduced planetary protection protocols to land in much, but not all, about 30 to 40 degrees latitude from the equator. Ice concentrations are greatest closer to the poles, as well as in some areas closer to the equator. Missions that do not plan to descend below the surface at all could land anywhere on the planet using reduced protocols.
The report made no specific recommendation on what these new planetary protection requirements should be. The entire planet is currently classified in Category 4, the second highest level of NASA’s planetary protection system, with strict sterilization and “bioburden reduction” requirements.
“It was not for us to come in and say, ‘What do we mean by reducing bioburden requirements?’ Hendrix said at the press conference. “What we have said is that there must be pre-launch cleanliness arrangements made by such missions.”
The report also recommended that any mission landing on Mars under reduced planetary protection requirements avoid locations such as cave openings that provide access to the planet’s subsoil. “We have wind transport which can complicate matters,” she said. The report offered a conservative estimate of a 600-kilometer buffer zone, based on wind speed and the survival time of a terrestrial microbe on the Martian surface.
While the committee offered recommendations for NASA, its members included a representative from ESA as well as people familiar with business operations. Joseph Alexander, a consultant who was the committee’s other co-chair, told the webinar that he hoped the recommendations would be taken into account by the Committee on Space Research, which oversees international standards for planetary protection.
Implementing them for trade missions is more difficult. “The problem today is that in the United States, there is no regulatory agency that has the specific authority and responsibility to do this for trade missions,” he said. he declares. “The US government needs to resolve the uncertainty over how it will handle trade missions.”
The report only briefly discusses how this approach could be used for human missions to Mars. “Given the underdeveloped nature of the planetary protection policy for human missions to Mars, caution is needed to address, even briefly, the appropriateness of applying guidelines for planetary protection for robotic missions to human missions. “, says the report.
“The current approach that has been effective in the past, which simply says ‘you will not be carrying more than x number of microbes on your spacecraft to Mars’, is most likely not applicable to a human mission,” said Alexander. “You can’t sterilize the crew, for example.”
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