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The category five catastrophe
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- NASA PLAYS KEY ROLE IN LARGEST ENVIRONMENTAL EXPERIMENT IN HISTORY
The category five catastrophe David Grinspoon, a planetary scientist who spearheaded the Magellan mission to Venus, noted that fictional accounts of space probes spreading microbes into another potentially unprotected biosphere has been a traditional concern. "You may not know it," wrote Grinspoon, "but NASA is guarding you against this danger through the Office of Planetary Protection, which is charged with preventing the inadvertent spreading of life between worlds during space exploration... NASA is also making concerted efforts to prevent 'forward contamination,' in which we would be the evil alien invaders who seed other planets with Earth bugs. NASA crashed the Galileo spacecraft into Jupiter... in an effort to avoid the remote possibility that the spacecraft would one day smash into Europa and cause an unforgivable planetary pandemic on that watery moon. ...[The Mars probes, Spirit and Opportunity] have all been carefully sterilized so that we will not return to Mars one day to find Earthly life forms that we accidentally deposited in an earlier voyage." The only samples that have been returned to Earth so far have come from the moon. Astronauts on the Apollo missions returned 379 kilograms (835 pounds) of rock and soil from the Moon, and three Russian spacecraft (Luna 16, 20 and 24) also returned moon samples. The samples were kept in sealed containers until they arrived at their respective laboratories for study. Some proposals discuss having both the European Space Agency and NASA launch martian sample return missions by 2011, with samples returning to Earth by 2016. Sample return missions currently in progress include spacecraft designed to sample a comet, an asteroid, and the solar wind. Although life is not likely to be found in these places, the precursor chemicals that make life possible may be present. NASA's Stardust mission, launched in 1999, will reach comet Wild 2 in January 2004. Stardust will return to Earth with both cometary and interstellar dust particle samples in January 2006. NASA's Genesis mission was designed to collect solar wind samples. The spacecraft was launched in August of 2001 and has now collected particles coming off the sun. The samples will be returned to Earth in September 2004. Japan's MUSES-C spacecraft, launched May 2003, is headed for asteroid 1998 SF36. After its arrival in June 2005, the spacecraft will gather up to one gram of material from a variety of sites on the asteroid. The samples are expected to arrive back on Earth by June 2007. In looking forward to these and other missions, any addition to the tools available for handling life's bountiful productivity may broaden the kinds of future space hardware that passes our own planet's ultimate "white glove" test. Read the original article at http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1100.html. NASA PLAYS KEY ROLE IN LARGEST ENVIRONMENTAL EXPERIMENT IN HISTORY NASA/GSFC release 2004-242 27 July 2004 Researchers from around the globe participating in the world’s largest environmental science experiment, the Large-Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA), will, fittingly, convene in Brazil this week. From July 27-29, some 800 researchers will attend the Third International Scientific Conference of the LBA in Brasilia, Brazil, to discuss key findings on how the world’s largest rainforest impacts the ecological health of Amazonia and the world. Never before has so much information about the Amazon been assembled for presentation at once. 
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