Across most of the space scientific community, the realization has solidified that there is life out there, meaning other than just on Earth. Sounds obvious but until the past 10 years there has been no hint of proof, just hypothesis.
All the Moon dust and rocks the Apollo program brought back showed no traces of life. Since then, probes, especially to the southern polar regions of the Moon, have shown the presence of water but no bio signatures.But last summer, NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover drilled into the mudstone and there was a dramatic upturn in probability we’re about to receive actual proof of life existing on another planet. “This finding… is the closest we’ve actually come to discovering ancient life on Mars,” said Nicky Fox, NASA Associate Administrator. He went on “…everything we know about life on Earth, this is the kind of signature we would see that was made by something biological. In this case, it’s kind of the equivalent of seeing leftovers from a meal, and maybe that meal had been excreted by a microbe. That’s what we’re seeing in this sample.”
Are they going to bring back a sample for ground-based testing? The project director for the Perseverance project, Katie Stack Morgan explained, “we’re pretty close to the limits of what the rover can do on the surface… That was by design, since the payload of the Mars Perseverance rover was selected with a sample return in mind.” Then we’ll know, is the goal here, to bring back samples.
But this Administration has just proposed cutting the Mars rover programs by more than 50%, taking a sample return mission off the table for now. It’s an expensive mission, to return samples to Earth. Yes, there’s the technology which we have not proved yet: a robot to land on mars, collect the samples, blast back into Mars orbit, transfer to a waiting spaceship to return in maybe a year to Earth. Or perhaps wait for some humans to land on Mars?
It is worth remembering at this point a medical necessity of the Apollo landings’ programs: Biohazard prevention. Every capsule, piece of clothing, instrument, and the astronauts themselves, on return to Earth from their Moon missions stayed in quarantine for 30 days. During that time, every medical, sterile, procedure was followed while dust, clothing, blood samples, and all bodily fluids were tested every day. The worry then was that a single unknown bacteria or virus – and therefore pathogens for which life on Earth have no resistance – could terminate all or a great deal of life on our planet. And that risk still exists today for all space exploration.
One way missions, like the Mars Perseverance, pose no threat as a portable lab on a distant planet. It is only bringing something alien back here that could pose a threat. This is not a USA-only issue, it is a global, all humanity, issue. And until all of humanity can be 100% sure that all that the international space programs are prepared, budgeted, andscientifically sure, no one, nothing, should be returned to Earth. There is a safe way forward, but no single country’s space program nor any commercial entities should not be allowed to recklessly proceed with ambitious goals devoid of security for this potential risk to everything for everyone.
Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, New York, now lives in Gila, New Mexico.
