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From: wanderer@post8.tele.dk
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 06:27:44 +0200
Fwd Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 10:33:36 -0800
Subject: NASA's Protection Of Earth Against Alien Life


Source: Discovery Channel Online

http://www.discovery.com/area/unofficialspace/space971219/space.html

Go to the page for images!

Stig

*******

John D. Rummel has a mission: to protect the planet. His
job goes beyond the responsibilities we all share to
recycle, refrain from littering and repair our cars'
emissions systems. Rummel's charter comes from NASA,
which has pledged to uphold a United Nations' treaty
setting down commandments for space exploration.

As NASA's planetary protection officer, two rules concern
Rummel:

•Thou Shalt Not Allow Earth Life to Infect Thy Sister
Planets.
•Thou Shalt Not Allow Alien Life to Infect Earth.

He doesn't habitually dress in black, wear Ray-Bans or
sashay with a gun to get his job done. His is the
painstaking work of a scientist, and his attention is
focused on the microscopic.

It Came From Outer Space

Rummel returns to NASA's one-man, part-time Planetary
Protection Office after a four-year hiatus. In his
earlier tenure, Rummel, and then his successor, laid out
plans to scour a troop of robotic explorers before they
were dispatched to Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Some
of them didn't need much sterilization. Conditions on
Venus, for example, are so hellish -- with temperatures
of 900 degrees Fahrenheit and an atmosphere 100 times the
pressure of Earth's -- that any hitchhiking Earth
microbes would be vaporized long before they'd have a
chance to "extraterrestrialize."

Going to Mercury or Venus is a Category 1 of the
Planetary Protection Program protocols. All that means is
that the planet is so hostile you can't screw it up,
explains Rummel.

Mars still holds the possibility of harboring life or at
least the fossilized remains of ancient microorganisms.
So that bumps up the level of concern to a Category 3 for
a spacecraft programmed to orbit Mars, and a Category 4
for one descending to the planet's surface.

During his tenure, Rummel will be working to prepare for
the highest level of security, Category 5: the stuff from
outer space.

Hello, Earth

Over the next five years, NASA plans to launch a trio of
missions to bring back samples of our celestial
neighborhood.

The Genesis mission, targeted for launch in January 2001,
is designed to capture electrically charged particles and
other elements spewing from the sun. The research is
intended to help refine theories about how the sun and
its companion planets were formed.

The Stardust spacecraft will travel more than halfway to
Jupiter to visit comet Wild 2 (pronounced "vilt") in
December 2004 to gather dust samples from its tail.
Stardust also will preserve bits of the interstellar dust
collected during its five-year journey to the comet.

Finally, after decades of remote surveys of Mars,
researchers hope to have bits of Martian soil and rocks
in their laboratories around 2008 to probe for additional
signs of organic life.

The last time NASA had to worry about protecting the
planet from extraterrestrial microbes was during the
early days of the Apollo moon program. Says Rummel, "I
think it's great that we live in a country where we can
actually envision picking up pieces of another world and
bringing them back. But it you're going to do it, you
have to do it responsibly."

A task group of the National Research Council is
considering the question of what restrictions should be
placed on extraterrestrial material and how to classify
the returning samples. Lunar substances, for example, are
now unrestricted. "There's so much free exchange of
material between the Earth and the moon, that we now
consider the moon, from a planetary protection viewpoint,
to be just like Earth," says Rummel.

For the Mars rocks in particular, Rummel envisions a P-4
level of containment, which is what you'd need if you
wanted to study the most dangerous viruses on Earth. More
insidious than AIDS. Ghastly life forms, like the Ebola
virus.

"We're not expecting anything on Mars to be of that
nature," Rummel hastens to add. "It's unlikely that
anything on Mars would be harmful." The containment is
intended as much to protect the integrity of the
scientific samples as it is to stave off a
microbiological attack on Earth.

But still, warns Rummel, "We don't have a lot of evidence
about what's really out there."

Copyright © 1997 Discovery Communications, Inc.