R.S.L.s are treated as special regions that NASA’s current robotic explorers are barred from because the rovers were not thoroughly sterilized
We're not going to sterilize our research equipment going to Mars and we're not going to search likely sites where we could find life because we don't want to contaminate them. And yet, looking for signs of life native to Mars (or even water which might support life) is the top reason we're there, judging by the headlines. Seems like someone in NASA needs to work out this conflict.
The amount of armchair condescension on HN is appalling.
According to the reddit AMA, NASA does do some amount of sterilization before going to Mars, it is enough to justify the exploratory mission. More sterilization would probably take more man hours, more $$$, which would delay the mission to account for an (estimated) low probability of finding water. It seems like they've chosen to iterate instead of getting it perfect the first time, something we're all familiar with.
"The rovers have been sterilized for their particular landing sites where there's been no evidence of present day liquid water. To go to the RSL rovers will be required to be sterilized to a higher level. We also take samples of microbes that might be on the spacecraft before they're launched, so we can compare with any future discoveries. -RZ" [1]
Apart from that,
"These features are on steep slopes, so our present rovers would not be able to climb up to them.-RZ" [2]
They will be working on moving further. Let's congratulate them for this wonderful major accomplishment at least.
I admit, there is a question here about exploration strategy. The question is how to approach it -- and a little humility and willingness to poke around for information would be in order.
"Significant changes in our knowledge of the capabilities of terrestrial organisms and the existence of possibly habitable martian environments have led to a new appreciation of where Mars Special Regions may be identified and protected. The SR-SAG also considered the impact of Special Regions on potential future human missions to Mars, both as locations of potential resources and as places that should not be inadvertently contaminated by human activity."
Condescension on HN??!? I guess it's the way those boards all end up. People give their two cents on things they often doesn't research about, armchairs critics on work done by proven researchers. Kinda depressing though because lot's of brilliant people work these things out and we end up with BS comments like these ones instead of some deserved "Wow".
Please don't invent hostile motives in my post when none were being offered. I was simply pointing out the impasse expressed in the article. This isn't NASA's internal blog of scientists, so I'd think that possibly dumb speculation could be offered.
The iteration explanation makes some sense, although these seem like very expensive iterations.
FWIW its how your original post comes off. It may not be an accurate representation of your beliefs or intentions, but it is a reasonable interpretation of your words: "Seems like someone in NASA needs to work out this conflict."
You are literally strolling into a subject you know nothing about and putting forward an opinion that amounts to "wow, these guys sure are dumb, huh?" It's a very common way to comment on science stories and it's absolutely infuriating.
Why not this?
"So, I don't understand what's going on here, this seems weird because of X, Y, or Z, can someone explain what's going on?"
Or this?
"Is NASA really so dumb that they would do X, Y, and Z given that A, B, and C seem to be at odds with that?"
Instead we get: "Hah. NASA is so dumb." Even though we live in 2015 and the results of even 15 minutes of effort involving google and wikipedia could clear up a lot of these misconceptions.
Why are people so heavily invested in maintaining their own ignorance? Why do people insist on jumping to the conclusion that thousands of top tier scientists couldn't POSSIBLY have thought of the same things that occurred to them in the few moments spent thinking about it before deciding to make a post?
You're piling on too hard here. It's unfair of you to put things that crusso didn't say in quotation marks. That is guaranteed to produce a defensive reaction that makes the argument worse rather than better. And then you depict a caricature so idiotic, it's surely unfair.
You're correct of course that commenters are too quick to make gotcha criticisms when they ought to pause and realize that there's almost certainly more going on. But this is something most people do, and we should each take care of our own part of it first.
There's another aspect of this too. On HN, the problem is as much created by the upvoters as by the commenter. Sometimes a comment was intended as an offhand observation—the sort of thing you'd throw out to friends, not meant to sound authoritative, let alone pompous. But by the time it gets upvoted to the top comment, it can sound like the criticism of an asshole. HN unfortunately has a number of areas like this, where every individual contribution is positive, or at least well-intended, yet the total they add up to is negative. Let's not make the mistake of blaming individuals for a collective problem that we all contribute to.
Except I didn't say any of the versions of what you paraphrased. I didn't say anyone was dumb. I didn't say "Hah". None of it.
Why are people so heavily invested in maintaining their own ignorance?
More attacks. Why? Look, I took a 10 minute break to read some HN this morning and read the article. I didn't know all the details and I had to get back to work, so just threw out a speculation. Judging from the 35+ upvotes I received, it was something many others reading the article were curious about.
Why do people insist on jumping to the conclusion that thousands of top tier scientists couldn't POSSIBLY have thought of the same things that occurred to them in the few moments spent thinking about it before deciding to make a post?
I guess you could wonder why you jumped to the conclusion of my thought process because you were wrong. NASA isn't just scientists. Often decisions are made for political, bureaucratic, and budgetary reasons that have nothing to do with the science. Sometimes, smart people do lame bone-headed things.
All equipment designed for landing on Mars in the modern era is extensively sterilized.
The concern is that given what we've learned about microorganisms in space, this may not be enough; "Extensively sterilized" is never "Perfectly sterilized", at least, not without building it out of solid metal and annealing it in space. There was also a last-minute variance granted to the drill bit on Curiosity, which was contaminated between sterilization and launch by briefly opening the box in a lower-spec clean room.
As we enter an era of inexpensive launch capacity, the sterilization step is actually so expensive it may exceed the cost of the launch vehicle. There is a case to be made for dropping these protections: They're a barrier in the way of a widespread robotic exploration mission, and a manned mission is going to be implicitly contaminative, since you can't run humans through an autoclave. The most conservative route to detecting life before sending humans is years and years of robotic launches to a variety of regions, with several sample returns. It's arguable, but I'm not sure we have the stomach to do that before the 2030's, there's no sign of the major expansion of NASA funding that would be required for the decade of exponentially escalating robotic precursors to a human mission, on the horizon. Given that we're apparently not going to protect Mars from life, that brings into question why we should bother pretending that's what we're doing today. There have already been substantial transfers on previous landers and impactors.
There have certainly been metioroids starting on Mars that made it to Earth without being sterilized[1]. Now, Earth does have a deeper gravity well which might make a difference but Earth microbes have had geological epochs to make the trip to Mars wheres you'd only expect a meteoroid to remain recognizable on Earth's surface for that long in comparison.
So I figure that if contamination of Mars by Earth life was a problem it would have happened by the Paleozoic.
Well, calling Allan Hills 84001 "unsterilized" is a bit of a stretch, since even the most optimistic theory is that it contains fossilized lifeforms, not live ones.
I dunno. I agree that something like the K/T impactor probably blasted bits of our planet all over the Solar System, but I suspect the depth of the gravity well brings more factors into play than just "how long it would take for ejecta to get to X". For example, accelerating a bit of surface to escape velocity would involve a lot more energy on Earth than on Mars, and at the point of impact I'd have thought that energy would translate to possibly-sterilizing heat.
The hypothesis, I believe, is that the stuff in Allan Hills 84001 was fossilized back when Mars was wet but it was only ejected a few million years ago. The important part is that the inside of the rock never got too hot. As long as there are bacteria which can take being frozen for long periods of time they ought to be able to survive.
As to larger impacts I really can't speak with any authority and I'm not aware of any studies which would say. But my intuition would be that the greater volumes in large the ejecta from large impacts would heat up less due to more insulation. I should probably put this on /r/askScience and see if anybody knows more.
Large asteroids are generally frozen on the inside when they impact the earth, similarly any large ejecta would likely contain pockets that remain relatively cool. Polar ice would actually be a great candidate for such a transit.
That makes sense, but wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that there's a major difference between natural seeding of life on other planets via meteors, and humans bringing it over while trying to find natural life?
Furthermore, what if life on Mars were fragile enough that Earthly microscopic organisms destroyed it?
At some point we'll either have to either stop worrying about life on Mars being hidden under a rock somewhere or forever put a "humans keep out" sign on Mars.
I'm kinda of this thought process as well. If there are hospitable conditions there and we haven't found microbes after a while, I think we should just start dumping tons of them over there. We need something to put some atmosphere there for us. Algae seems to be a really good bet.
It's time for us to accept that we implicitly modify everything we touch. Prime directive needs to have some detectability metric by which we decide it's OK for us to go gangbusters. If the native martian amoebas cannot survive with us present then they lose the evolution race, sorry.
Besides, if there are primitive life forms on Mars, it's quite presumptuous of us to assume we could so easily wipe them out.
While I agree with the general idea, I also hope that, if there are more advanced civilizations out there and they find us, that they don't consider us "native amoebas".
Me too, although our morality doesn't influence their choices unless we can communicate with them and/or realistically fight for our survival. Do you think there are races out there quietly observing our behavior and preparing their verdict? If so, I sure hope we are given awareness of membership in the law before the sentencing.
I always thought that the main reason for being careful about bringing microbes to Mars is so that it is easier to tell whether any microbes we find on Mars evolved there. I thought that being careful about bringing microbes to Mars will stop being important to most of the people who currently care about it after we determine where any microbes we find there evolved. Was I wrong about that?
In that scenario you're saying that the Martian landscape itself is not worthy of preservation, while any microorganisms could be. Both amoeba and rocks have no claim to consciousness etc., so why is one worthy of preservation while the other is not?
OP is not interested in preservation for preservation's sake.
It's not like we should care about the consciousness of microbes. What he meant, as I read it, is that if there are microbes we'll want to sample them and study them BEFORE we change the landscape and possible kill them.
If there were life on Mars. It will be the our first, and may be the possible only, source of foreign life to study.
I don't think we want to contaminate or destroy our only source of knowledge on other kind of life.
May be we can do that later, once we study them enough or have kept it enough for further study. But let's not make our first decision be "We gonna destroy it someday anyway, let's just stomp on it carelessly right now"
I don't think the care as much about contamination in the way it might mess with the martian ecosystem, what they do care about is getting uncontaminated results.
Finding a life outside of Earth will be one of the greatest discoveries of man kind, something that will never be overshadowed by anything. They want to make sure that when we'll find something it didn't catch a ride on what ever we sent to find it.
Eventually when we start exploring space it wouldn't really matter, yes some precautions might still be kept but we wouldn't take as much care as we do now.
I for one also do not see humans contaminating an alien ecosystem as something unnatural, humans evolved, they've spread out, they seed life (intentionally or otherwise) this is just as much of a natural process as the potential for comets and meteorites to seed solar systems and beyond with organic compounds and even life it self.
>> wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that there's a major difference between natural seeding of life on other planets via meteors, and humans bringing it over while trying to find natural life?
There would definitely be a difference vis-a-vis reconstructing the natural history of Mars.
Suppose some biological particle makes it to mars. Then we pick it up, discover that its very dead already, DNA sequence it and find that it matches the common flu. Write it off as contamination, rinse & repeat until we find something that is alive & looks like green men.
Or can science genuinely not distinguish earth contaminants vs alien life?
One possibility, perhaps very unlikely and perhaps somewhat likely, is that Earth life could actually survive and adapt to Martian conditions and subsequently destroy existing Martian life.
That seems almost comically improbable, but given that we've found that lichen can survive in the vacuum of space for a year and a half [1] and the mere existence of life on hydrothermal vents and inside Chernobyl[2], I think we can safely say that life is surprising.
So, if we accidentally terraform a planet with only microbial life, what's the downside?
The only loss I can see is the lost opportunity to study a truly alien ecosystem in detail, but if we can't study it without fatally contaminating it, that was never really a benefit we could enjoy anyway.
I doubt that the level of life succeeding enough to damage our ability to determine if there was already life there is on the same order as "terraforming a planet". I doubt there would be much upside.
Sure - by 'terraforming' I just meant 'replacing Martian life with Earth life'; terraforming from the microorganisms perspective perhaps, not from the perspective of humans. There's a lot of work involved in that, way beyond our current engineering capacity.
I'll make my thinking more explicit ...
The best case is that we either a) don't introduce microbial life, or b) it just flat-out dies. Then we can examine Mars for signs of life (current or historical).
The worst case is that we contaminate Mars with microbes that flourish there, forever destroying our ability to examine Mars for signs of life.
I'm assuming we can't explore Mars without risking the worst case. So it seems worthwhile to try; the very worst case is that we replace a Martian microbial ecosystem with one from Earth.
If there is life on mars, then it would be highly adapted for the Martian Climate over millions of years. It's unlikely that Earth Life would be able to out-compete them.
I think that's pretty reasonable, but if martian life has a completely different biochemical basis, it might be much less able to adapt. So, maybe, it has managed to hold on for a billion years, but terrestrial microbes may come equipped with a much richer genetic library, allowing them to adapt exponentially more quickly and overrun martian life.
Another way to look at it is that Mars seems to have almost no biodiversity, so it's possible that martian life forms may be well adapted to their environment, but not for competition. Terrestrial microbes have evolved in an utterly brutal competitive environment and they've been shown to adapt to extreme conditions, so it's not unthinkable that they may have a substantial edge over martian life.
Maybe. Just a laymen, so I could be totally wrong.
I know little about this stuff, but my impression is that there are so many different variations of life and also so many variations that can live in the most bizarre conditions, that we haven't even scratched the surface of classifying them all.
Something could survive the trip, grow, be found and still be entirely unknown to us. And it probably wouldn't be all that unlikely.
Take this study, that swabbed people's belly buttons and found thousands of unknown bacteria, bacteria only found before in foreign countries the person had never visited and "extremophile bacteria that typically thrive in ice caps and thermal vents"
I'll first refer you to my previous post about Clean Room Operations at JPL [0].
All equipment leaving Earth is sterilized. The thoroughness of sterilization varies from project to project, instrument to instrument, and the agreed to HW & Planetary Protection Plans. It helps ensure that equipment is not giving false readings. Serious money is also laid out for HW & Planetary Protection (there's a whole division of probably 150 people at JPL) and sophisticated equipment used to test for contamination.
However, if there was deviation from the original Planetary Protection Plan [1], it was likely to execute some other test, timing/scheduling conflict, or some other "administrative" reason.
And with respect to finding water on Mars, why would you send your robot to a polar cap or even a "lake" with visible/detectable water? If you're attempting to prove that water and water flow processes exist & are active on Mars, it's probably better to test a fringe area, hence, the 3.3m requirement.
Should that read all equipment leaving Earth from the United States? Do other countries with developing space programs adhere to the same practices? Does the US have agreements with other countries to make sure we're all on the same page so to speak?
JPL (& many other NASA centers) collaborate quite regularly with the International Space Community. ESA [0] being the prime example (Cassini-Huygens[1], MER [2], etc.). This also includes commercial collaborators as well like SpaceX, LMA, Ball, etc. The community is relatively small and quite professional about their work. They usually don't take shortcuts.
But to answer your first question, Yes. All HW & Planetary Protection practices are not equally applied by all collaborators. However, ISO 14644-1 [3] is now a 15 year-old standard, at least, for Clean Room work environments. Such practices and the HW & Planetary Protection Plans are for Project Managers & Principal Investigators to manage & implement. "Faster, Cheaper, Better; pick any two" [4] we always said in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at JPL.
Agreements are in place for all projects, and, it usually in the Principal Investigator's best interest to ensure his instrument/subsystem has the best HW & Planetary Protection Plan in place. It ensures their instrument/subsystem is operating nominally and has the longest usable life possible.
And that someone seems to be this lady, with this most BAMF job responsibility ever:
“These are ongoing conversations,” said Catharine A. Conley, NASA’s planetary protection officer, who coordinates the efforts to minimize the chances of life inadvertently crossing the solar system.
Isn't this nearly impossible in the long (although here I mean really, really long) term? Think of trying to minimize the chances of some flu strain in one continent from getting to the other. I mean, once humans start going here and there, what do you do, do you keep everything in containment (exhaled gases, excrements, every form of waste)?
The only way you could keep human biota 100% contained is if the humans never interacted with anything outside the welded-shut steel sphere they inhabited - in which case, why bother bringing them to Mars?
Well, shorter times delays on teleop are a useful thing. Humans can do that just as well from orbit but if you've gone all that way then the gravity on Mars might be enough of a health benefit to make it worth while landing.
No, I got the key word. How the heck is that decision made? And by whom? Elon Musk gets ready to put a lander on Mars and there's a NASA office now that must give permission?
Sorry, still not making sense.
"Office of planetary probe sterilization" would be much more descriptive. Otherwise we're taking on a helluva lot more authority and prerogative than we probably should.
I'm puzzled about why the existence of guidelines for contamination of other planets would be surprising.
Note, the concept of "Planetary Protection" also applies to contamination in the reverse direction for sample-return missions, which are very much expected to be part of Mars 2020.
I didn't know this before looking, but it turns out there are UN agreements, and something called the "Outer Space Treaty" to which the U.S. is a signatory (1967). This treaty, in essence, prohibits "harmful contamination" of other planets. There is a body of scientists (a panel within COSPAR) which deliberates on contamination and issues guidelines in a timely way. ESA also has a policy. So there do seem to be players here that are larger than Elon Musk.
But these agreements are subject to revision and negotiation as more becomes known. Presumably something will be worked out as the reality comes nearer.
"Presumably something will be worked out as the reality comes nearer."
One would hope so. I must point out that private space travel was entirely out of the question with NASA for many years. It's only been very recently that the idea has started to catch on -- and it's not universally lauded across the agency. Gotta wonder what kind of obstacles we're currently setting up (perhaps without fully realizing it) for anything beyond LEO.
"Strong interest exists among various countries and private industries to send humans to Mars, both for short-term exploration and long-term colonization." (and on for 3 dense pages).
So, private ventures are part of their deliberations.
[Sec. 8, end]
"It will be impossible for all human-associated processes and operations to be conducted within entirely closed systems, so protocols need to be established so (1) human missions to Mars will not contaminate Special Regions nor be contaminated by materials (or possibly organisms) from them and (2) human activities on Mars will avoid converting Non-Special Regions to Special Regions and thus help control the spread of terrestrial microorganisms on Mars."
*
The basic strategy is to identify and avoid "Special Regions".
Since all current private industry space efforts are still organized with NASA, I imagine this part of NASA is involved with efforts such as SpaceX as well.
> Seems like someone in NASA needs to work out this conflict.
Perhaps it's not so much of a conflict as a multi-staged approach...
The non-sterile equipment is currently roaming around and has just said "Hey! There's probably water and maybe life over there!" and now we get to build something to go poke at it with a sterilized stick.
Agreed. I heard a guest on NPR address this and he made two points: there's likely already been plenty of material transferred between the two planets; and human arrival will guarantee the transfer of biological material.
Q: What are the risks of contaminating Mars with Earth life forms, or vice versa?
A: Actually, it is arguable that this has already been happening for billions of years. During his study of known Martian meteorite ALH84001, Cal Tech's Joseph Kirschvink showed that large parts of the rock were never heated above 40C (104F), proving the theory of University of Arizona researcher Jay Melosh that it is possible for rocks to be ejected from one planet's surface and land on another's surface without being excessively heated. More importantly, this discovery showed that not all rocks ejected from either Mars or Earth are sterilized -- a fact that, when combined with the known ability of microorganisms to remain alive in a dormant state for millions of years, means that Earth life has probably already traveled to Mars, and if life ever existed on Mars, it has already traveled to Earth.
Sterilization is not a binary thing, it's a matter of degrees. All of NASA's Mars rovers have been constructed in clean rooms and sterilized according to planetary protection protocols. But there are levels of such protocols and though the levels that have been used so far are quite high they are not sufficient to reduce the chance of some micro-organisms surviving the trip to Mars low enough to justify risking putting the rovers in environments with potential Martian life.
Additionally, only recently have we been able to construct rovers that could host the equipment necessary to reliably detect and study Martian life, so the level of sterilization that we've been using hasn't been a problem.
The article mentions how equipment that needs to be sterilized is baked to a very high temperature - but I wonder, can it not be sterilized with radiation, like we already do with food? All electronics on a rover are already radiation hardened, after all Curiosity has to work while having a chunk of plutonium strapped to its back. Is this not an option of some reason?
The chunk of plutonium is very well shielded. Curiosity is more likely to be irradiated by cosmic rays than it is by its RTG.
It doesn't matter anyway, as some microorganisms are known to endure exposure to open space for years. Sterilizing Curiosity would likely be impractical (its size and weight are comparable to a small car, which is much larger than a potato). A smaller probe designed for finding life and only that could be a safer bet.
Shot in the dark: Killing organisms is not sufficient. The corpse of a bacterium is still a contaminant: It still has organic compounds that can be measured by our equipment, and potentially interact with organic compounds on Mars. For our purposes, the bacterial corpses must be fully incinerated.
I remember hearing something relatively recently about how they detected some complex molecules with one of the rovers (indicative of life creating them), but the leading theory was that they were leftover from when the rover was being built and weren't cleaned enough. So that's definitely a possibility, we aren't looking at a slide and seeing them move, we're just looking for some chemicals so dead bacteria trips the sensors just as well as live.
Humans did not invent radiation, you know. In fact we live in a remarkably well-shielded area. Certainly better shielded than the surface of Mars.
Besides, we're on another planet. If our payload was nothing but the nastiest chemical we could come up with, we still couldn't ship enough to Mars for it to matter.
No, the only payload that could conceivably be harmful is one that can self-replicate, which at this juncture means life. (Ask again in a hundred years.)
For sterilization, they will probably use gamma rays. They are strong enough to break a lot of chemical molecules, and then kill all the bacteria. But the gamma rays are not strong enough to break the atoms nuclei or make them radioactive. So the rover will be sterilized but not radioactive.
This is similar to the process that irradiate food with gamma rays. You can store them in a perfectly sealed place without refrigeration and they a are safe to eat because they don't have bacteria and they don't have radiation. So this is a safe method. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation
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Another different radiation process is to irradiate it with neutrons. It kills the bacteria but it also may make some nuclei radioactive. (I don't know the necessary doses, so perhaps this may be safe, but I'd be much more careful. Something like this is used to treat cancer. Also, this don't produce a lot of radioactive atoms, and the rover is small, so the radioactive material will be not too much. Anyway, as I said before, I'd be much more careful.)
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Another possibility is mixing the food (for example a tea) with some radioactive material (for example plutonium). This kill the bacteria but also may kill whoever takes it. If you are very careful with the doses, you may use something like this for medicine applications (for example with radioactive iodine). But I guess that if the dose is low enough not to kill the patient, it will not kill all the bacteria. This is definitively not the method they may use to sterilize a rover.
> And yet, looking for signs of life native to Mars (or even water which might support life) is the top reason we're there, judging by the headlines. Seems like someone in NASA needs to work out this conflict. (emphasis mine)
maybe it is just media that needs to work out this conflict.
We're not going to sterilize our research equipment going to Mars and we're not going to search likely sites where we could find life because we don't want to contaminate them. And yet, looking for signs of life native to Mars (or even water which might support life) is the top reason we're there, judging by the headlines. Seems like someone in NASA needs to work out this conflict.