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This spring, China will attempt its first landing on Mars. But in anticipation of this important step, scientists are wondering if the Tianwen-1 rover can carry ground contamination with it to the surface.
Because scientists have high hopes that they will someday find traces of life on Mars, spaceships that land on the planet will be as perfectly free of terrestrial life as possible. These days, that means a complicated cleaning procedure throughout the assembly of the spacecraft and frequent testing for spores, an inactive form of particularly resistant bacteria.
NASA’s Perseverance rover underwent precisely this treatment before leaving Earth in July for its trip to Mars. However, Congress bans NASA to communicate with his Chinese counterpart.
“I don’t know anything beyond what we all know about public information releases, but they are involved,” Lisa Pratt, NASA Planetary Protection Officer, said at a virtual meeting of the committee leading the creation of a new 10-year survey identifying the priorities of planetary scientists in the 2030s on February 11.
Related: Photos of China’s Tianwen-1 mission to Mars
If the Tianwen-1 mission succeeds in landing on Mars, China will become just the second country to operate a spacecraft on the surface of the Red Planet, joining NASA. (The Soviet Union and the European Space Agency had spacecraft on the surface, but those missions crashed or failed in less than a minute.)
Like the United States, China is a party to the Outer Space Treaty, created in 1967, which describes which nations can and cannot do in space – yes to work for all humanity, no to nuclear weapons, for example. A principle of the Outer Space Treaty refers to planetary protection, stating that countries must explore other worlds “in order to avoid their harmful contamination”.
There are a few reasons to be wary of introducing land bugs into other worlds. On the one hand, scientists don’t want terrestrial creatures to be able to settle on Mars; for another, scientists want to be sure that if they detect traces of life on Mars, that sign is indeed from Mars, and not from a capricious fingerprint coming from Earth.
According to previous reports from Space.com, Tianwen-1 is targeting a landing at Utopia Planitia, at a site where there is no trace of water ice near the surface. (When it comes to planetary protection, sites with water are still the primary concern of scientists.) Long ago, however, there may have been ancient groundwater deep below the surface and lava flows. mud in the Tianwen-1 landing zone.
NASA’s Viking 2 and InSight landers landed elsewhere in this same region. The twin Viking landers were the first spacecraft sampled by NASA engineers before departure, archive their organic and biological material so that, if the instruments detect a potential signal of life, scientists can compare this data to samples remaining on Earth.
Launched in the 1970s, the Viking mission predated NASA’s serious planetary protection standards for Mars. But InSight landed in 2018 and was required to meet specific standards Before launching the spacecraft dirt, engineers search and count the exposed surfaces of the spacecraft for spores.
Spore counting is a standard NASA would like to move away from, but potential future techniques, including those that rely on DNA analysis, are not yet ready, Pratt said. So the spores are. And China is probably in the same place, Pratt said, noting that Chinese scientists have contact with a key Italian planetary protection team, and therefore should be aware of current standards.
However, while NASA and its Chinese counterpart cannot interact directly, sometimes their representatives end up at the same meetings, and Pratt shared the story of one such occasion, which she attributed to November, when she s ‘is found sitting next to a Chinese man. scientists.
“I asked a question in front of everyone, I said, ‘Can you tell us about what you have done for the sake of planetary protection?’” Pratt told the committee. “And the individual kind of said, ‘We did what you all do, we did the metric spore measurements and we were very compliant.'”
NASA, however, has not seen these measures and may never do.
“They at least said the right thing. Needless to say, there is no inspection, no external verification,” Pratt said. “Right now my thought is, ‘OK, I take their word for it’ because I have no way of knowing otherwise.”
Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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