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Missions to the celestial bodies of the Solar System can alter both the Earth's biosphere and that of other worlds.
With the advance of space exploration, it is urgent to review the global protection policies to avoid the contamination of neighboring celestial bodies by terrestrial microorganisms and vice versa, warns a report jointly released by the Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine of the United States.
In this way, the authors of this paper urge NASA to improve the planetary protection process before specifying its most ambitious projects, because they believe that the procedures used today are obsolete.
The UN Treaty on Outer Space dates from 1967 and states that the signatory countries will explore other worlds to "avoid harmful pollution" and prevent "adverse changes in the environment of the earth "
This text of American scientists reminds us that terrestrial bacteria or viruses carried by the crew or ships of a space mission could undergo mutations during the course of time. In addition, if future inhabited missions reach planets such as Mars, these microorganisms could also change and it would be difficult to determine if they belong to the place where they occur. They are intended to explore or are alterations of microbes from our planet.
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