5 The future of planetary protection
Planetary protection is facing several new challenges. As access to space by the private sector increases, planetary protection requirements still need to be upheld. It is the legal (and arguably ethical and moral) obligation of those signatories to the Outer Space Treaty to ensure that mechanisms are in place to achieve this, such as embedding it into regulations, and licenses, even though the Policy on Planetary Protection itself is not legally binding.
As has been alluded to in places, work to understand the resilience of microbes to different extraterrestrial conditions is providing insights that could be used both to develop requirements for planetary protection and to use as methods of reducing the potential of contamination. Understanding the organic emissions from spacecraft is also critical for compiling organic inventories needed for future exploration missions.
In this course, we have focused mainly on robotic missions, but several space agencies and other organisations are also planning for near-future crewed missions to Mars and the Moon. COSPAR’s Planetary Protection Panel have identified several knowledge gaps that need to be filled to address this challenge and have begun to work with space agencies to identify how to apply planetary protection principles and requirements to such missions. However, it is recognised that removing the possibility of biological and organic contamination by a human is not possible; humans have their own microbiome made up of thousands of different types of microorganisms. It is also impossible to fully isolate any members of a crew or their spacecraft from an extraterrestrial environment.
This is prompting efforts to better understand the interactions between humans and the space environment, how life support and other essential systems could be adapted to minimise contamination events, and how the space environment itself might propagate or sterilise any biological life humans might invertedly deliver.
