Transcript

Planetary protection is so important because it enables exploration, it enables science, both current missions and future missions.

So it's all about protecting our ability to learn and to learn through exploration of the solar system.

To me, planetary protection is really important because as a scientist that's looking for life elsewhere, we need to be able to protect the environments that we're looking for that life so we know that it's life endemic to a planet and not something that we brought from Earth.

One of the key reasons plastic protection is so important is that when we go to these worlds, we want to be sure that what we're detecting there is native to that world.

We want to, we don't want to be studying something we've brought with us from the Earth.

So that's one key reason, scientific reason for wanting to, to understand what we're bringing with us and take any necessary steps we can to minimize it.

And that's quite aside from from other reasons, which could be, you know, protecting the, the, the environment itself for its own sake.

We don't want to kind of be spreading Earth contamination to these places because they, they have their own history and that we want to keep them pristine for their own sake as well.

Planetary production is a very important item in space exploration.

The reason is if we do not do planetary protection, then we cannot do a safe and sustainable exploration of our solar system and the bodies within it because we cannot retrieve the science that we need without contaminating the body that we're exploring.

And we also could put in danger our own biosphere by bringing back material that has not gone through the protocol and the processes that planetary protection has put in place.

So as we go through time, we're going to explore further and further into our solar system.

Hopefully, we're going to be bringing back more and more samples from different planetary bodies, some of them habitable.

And we're going to need to make sure that we can protect the Earth while doing it, while taking everything we can from these samples to understand the origin of our solar system and perhaps ourselves.