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We stand on the cusp of a cosmic scavenger hunt—within the next decade, the world’s space agencies plan to launch a diverse line-up of robotic sample ‘hunters’ into the solar system on a variety of missions. Their collective efforts will yield an exotic list of deliverables: scoops of Martian regolith, a breath of solar wind, scrapings from an asteroid, and bits of a comet’s head and tail.
What are the consequences of bringing back this material back from space? Tackling this question is the primary work of SETI Institute scientist, Dr. Margaret Race. “We don’t know what it would mean if there’s life someplace else” she explains. A sample return mission to Mars for example, must be done responsibly and consider potential environmental impacts. Samples must be contained and studied carefully. And potential interactions with life here on Earth are completely unknown.
“I tell students that when we go to other parts of our own Earth, we don’t move organisms around without thinking about it. We know that if you bring in killer bees or fire ants, or kudzu vine, you can cause ecological disruption,” says Race. Similarly, human illnesses can result from microbial movement. While outer space is an extremely harsh environment, scientists have found that some Earth organisms, extremeophiles, are able to survive exposure to the same rigors of space.
“It’s incumbent upon us to do our exploration in a very careful way,” she stresses. “That’s why biologists like myself are in planetary protection. If you are going to bring back something from another planet, do it carefully and do it right.”
Early Experiences
"I grew up at a time when there was a lot of interest in the environment," says Race. During her formative years in the ‘60s, ecological awareness blossomed alongside headline-grabbing advances in Earth and space exploration, as humankind sounded the depths of Earth’s oceans and pierced the thin, blue shell of Earth’s atmosphere, tentatively probing the edge of the cosmic ocean.
A competitive swimmer who lived two blocks from the beach in Boston, Race vividly remembers the Mercury and Apollo missions of the ’60s and ’70s, the first Earth Day in 1970, and being “smitten” with Jacques Cousteau, whose “Undersea World” introduced millions of television viewers to a hidden realm on Earth."
Race explains her interest in space, “My dad worked for General Electric in the division responsible for the small aircraft engines built into the helicopters that retrieved astronauts.” She was in 7th grade when Scott Carpenter circled the Earth three times in his Mercury space capsule. Intrigued, the young teen followed the flight and made a mission scrapbook, which her father managed to forward to the astronaut.
A few years later, she met Carpenter at an ocean symposium at Northeastern University. “He sat with me in the cafeteria,” she recalls. The two discussed the space program and Carpenter’s work with Sea Lab over cups of hot chocolate. When Race expressed her interest in marine biology, the astronaut/aquanaut put her in touch with a Boston dive club that trained her to SCUBA dive, an activity that became and has remained a passion.
In college, work-study jobs helped influence her career path. After sifting marine sediments in a geology lab, she decided against spending her life “analyzing sand and rocks.” Subsequent work with doctors practicing undersea-diving medicine nudged her towards the life sciences. “My junior and senior years were packed with biology, geology, limnology, oceanography, and even environmental engineering,” she remembers.
Protocol for Mars Sample Return
Race has been working with an international team of people in developing the first draft of the Mars sample handling protocol. “If and when we come back from Mars with samples,” she explains, “we’ll have to test them in a way to determine whether or not there’s life in them, and whether or not that life--or anything in the samples--could potentially be a hazard to us.” The group is charged with determining:
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What kind of containment will be needed?
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What kind of life detection tests and equipment should be used?
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What kind of biohazard tests should be conducted?
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Who should decide whether or not these samples are ready to be released from containment so that scientists worldwide can study at them?
In the past, similar protocol applied to the Apollo missions. Moon rock samples were subjected to a full battery of tests before they were released. Samples from a Mars mission will be much smaller “only about a pound or so—500 grams,” Race explains. “Some samples will be studied non-destructively, but others will be expended in the process of testing them. So careful consideration goes into being sure we have an exacting and carefully designed protocol before we come back with the samples.”
Forward Contamination: Protecting Space from Hitchikers
Forward contamination, the inadvertent transport of Earth microbes to a planet, a moon, or an asteroid is an equally important concern. While Earth protection may need little explanation, she points out “if there are organisms out there on other bodies, we certainly wouldn’t want to interfere with them until we really understood them.” So we take precautions against “hitchhiker” microbes from Earth to protect the science we conduct on other locations. “You worry about what you take into a place and you worry about what you bring back,” says Race. “Just as you do here on Earth.”
It’s The Law
While not widely known, planetary protection is covered under international treaties. In 1967, the United Nations passed the Outer Space Treaty, which required that space exploration avoid all harmful cross-contamination. During the Apollo program the astronauts, the lunar samples, and the spacecraft itself were all quarantined for up to thirty days to ensure no contamination was brought back to Earth.
The same issues apply to other missions in the solar system, whether to Mars, Europa or elsewhere. “The big difference since the time of Apollo,” notes Race “is that laws and institutions have changed dramatically. Not many people realize it, but the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] didn’t exist at the time of the first Apollo mission in 1968.”
Today’s environmental laws impose an additional layer of legal requirements. The whole legal infrastructure around space related issues need constant updating. Race identifies several ambiguous areas she describes as ‘fascinating.’
For example, “The US Department of Agriculture can quarantine soils, which are defined as ‘the loose covering of the earth.’ Does it apply to the loose covering of another planet? We don’t know what kind of life there might be, so what law would it fit under? What institution would be the one to take care of possible life on another location in the solar system?” While she admits that people are not losing sleep over such questions, they are “definitely worth looking at.”
Ethical Considerations
Planetary protection also encompasses a series of ethical considerations. For starters, “What are the risks of contamination, and who should make the decisions about the risks? How clean is clean? How careful should we be? Who should make decisions about that?” She continues, “If we were to find life in another location, there are also ethical questions. If there really are Martians and they are ‘only microbes,’ does that mean we shouldn’t go there? Does it mean we shouldn’t bring Martian organisms back to Earth? Should we culture them and study them here?”
No amount of scientific information can address these questions. Could there be ethical concerns if we discover life on Mars and return it to Earth? “Knowing that it could come up in an impact statement, I sought out some ethicists and theologians who were working on issues like these and began enticing them with these questions.”
“What resulted,” she continues, “was a paper—several papers now—on ethical issues about searching for and finding extraterrestrial life, taken very much from combined ethical and scientific perspectives.”
Earth vs. Space
Asked whether planetary protection issues are really significant given the enormous challenges that face us here on Earth, Race grows passionate. “I am working on Earth-centric problems,” she declares. “When I think about planetary protection I do it very much from the perspective of both a biologist and an ecologist, and I am concerned about environmental impacts on Earth. I know enough about basic biology to know that when we explore someplace else, when we move samples – say from Mars back to Earth – that we have to be careful, we have to do our science responsibly. When we ask questions about our place in the Universe and whether there might be life out there, we ask questions about ourselves as well.”
Science Communications
Race cites Carl Sagan’s passion for popular science, noting how important it is to “spark a sense of wonder” in the public. She speaks from experience, having held positions as Public Information Specialist for the EPA, and as a newsroom production assistant (and AAAS Mass Media Science Fellow) at KQED-TV, San Francisco’s public broadcast television station, early in her career.
“All the sciences involved in astrobiology, ranging from SETI to genetic engineering are things that most of us never studied in school,” she notes. “So in order to stay involved as citizens in a democracy we really need to have a sense of what the science is all about so that we can make decisions.”
In classrooms, she is consistently impressed by the questions students of all ages ask. “When I have kids ask me the same kind of questions that I hear among the rocket scientists and the university professors,” she says, “I know there’s something about asking questions that’s important. If you can think about it, if it’s a logical question, it falls right into the scientific method.”
“For any students who are interested in science or just the world around them, asking questions is the first step, so keep asking questions!” She smiles, “You never know where it will take you.”
May 23, 2003