Abstract
Over the past decades, the search for life beyond Earth has become one of the greatest motivations for mankind to travel to space. Mars, in particular, being one of the most fascinating planets in our solar system in reach of modern spacecraft, could deliver answers to many open questions. Nevertheless, travel to and landing on Mars is challenging for life detection missions. Since Mars could possibly provide biotopes for its own or terrestrial life, a contamination via microbial hitchhikers from Earth could have severe consequences. The scientific field of planetary protection is concerned about a possible contamination of extraterrestrial environments by terrestrial biomolecules and life forms. Additionally, a reverse contamination of Earth by extraterrestrial material is also a fundamental concern: “States parties shall pursue studies of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct explorations of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter and, when necessary, adopt appropriate measures for this purpose” (UN Outer Space Treaty; Anonymous 1967). This scope of ESA’s and NASA’s planetary protection policies emphasizes that forward contamination by terrestrial life and even by biomolecules needs to be avoided, in order to preserve extraterrestrial bodies and to prevent confounding of future life detection experiments on other planets.
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Moissl-Eichinger, C. (2012). Extremophiles in spacecraft assembly clean rooms. In: Stan-Lotter, H., Fendrihan, S. (eds) Adaption of Microbial Life to Environmental Extremes. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-99691-1_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-99691-1_10
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