New Report Criticizes NASA for Spending too Much on Sanitization Efforts

It's possible to be too cautious when it comes to preventing interplanetary contamination, argue two researchers in a report published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Alberto Fairén of Cornell University's department of astronomy and Dirk Shulze-Makuch of Washington State University's school of earth and environmental sciecnes believe the NASA Office of Planetary Protection's "detailed and expensive" efforts to keep Earth microorganisms off Mars are making missions to search for life on the Red Planet "unviable."

According to its website, the mission of the Office of Planetary Protection is "to assist and promote the responsible exploration of the solar system by minimizing the biological contamination of explored environments."

In order to accomplish this, the office oversees the construction of sterile or "low biological burden" spacecraft, the development of flight plans designed to "protect planetary bodies of interest" and, finally, the creation of plans to protect Earth from potentially contaminated returned extraterrestrial samples.

Established in the early years of the space program, the rules make missions costly and inefficient and are "unnecessarily restricting Mars exploration," the researchers argue.

In terms of Mars, for example, such efforts are most likely in vain, say Fairén and Schulze-Makuch, because "Earth life has most likely already been transferred to Mars" via meteorite impacts that have had 3.8 billion years to spread Earth life forms to Mars.

Should the organisms transferred to Mars over the eons failed to survive, modern organisms, the articles argues, would likely face the same fate. And even if they did survive, the scientists write, "it is too late to protect Mars from terrestrial life, and we can safely relax the planetary protection policies."

Furthermore, the duo point to the fact that several Earth spacecraft have already visited the Red Planet without undergoing the sterilization procedures and to no disastrous end. 

Meanwhile, the criticism has not been met with silence: proponents of current sterilization practices are arguing that the protection measures actually save time and money by addressing, for example, the potential of irrevocably altering Mars's ecosystems, should they exist.

"One of the purposes of planetary protection is to help keep us from suffering the consequences of our own ignorance," New Scientist  reports Catherine Conley, NASA planetary protection officer, as saying.

However, Fairén and Schulze-Makuch are not arguing that all cleaning should be thrown out altogether; the two believe that just enough measures should be taken in order to avoid confusing possible Martian organisms versus organisms brought from Earth. Sterilization for other missions, like orbiters and geology-oriented explorers, for example, could be drastically scaled back without any real risk of negative consequences, they believe.

"As planetary exploration faces drastic budget cuts globally," the two said in a statement, "it is critical to avoid unnecessary expenses and reroute the limited taxpayers' money to missions that can have the greatest impact on planetary exploration."