Keeping Alien Samples Safe For Study

Metrollica writes: "Space.com features an article describing NASA's plans to prepare the Johnson Space Center that could one day house extraterrestrial life." An excerpt from the article: "It's human nature to clean for company more thoroughly than one would for oneself, but nowhere is this truth taken to greater extremes than at the Johnson Space Center. NASA's setting new standards of cleanliness in its labs that handle samples returning from space. And their efforts are laying the groundwork for samples that might some day contain evidence of extraterrestrial life from Mars, Europa, and other points little known."

Comments

Andromeda Strain...

[Bonker]

There was no air on the moon or in high earth orbit, so there was no reason to keep the astronauts quaranteened.

HOWEVER, it was a good idea, because they didn't know everything they were dealing with yet.

On Mars, Europa, and Io, there exists a remote possibility for life. Retreival missions should be geared to keep this life hermetically isolated from the Earth's biosphere.... Just in case.

It'll be used sooner then you think...

[S-prime]

If all goes well the Stardust mission will be returning to Earth with cosmic dust particles from the comet WIld 2 sometime in 2006

From what is mentioned on the project webpage it seems that they plan to return the sample to Earth via a capsule to be jettisoned from the space probe when it returns.

While the chances for contamination are relatively low, it certainly can't hurt to be prepared.

More info at
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html

Dangerous stuff

[NewtonsLaw]

Imagine if there was once advanced, possibly even intelligent, life on Mars.

Would it be too far-fetched to speculate that perhaps that all higher life forms were wiped out by some virus or bacterial disease?

With the plant and animal life gone, the climate of the planet would change radically -- to the extent that we see today - but the cause of the catastrophy could stil be lurking in the soil.

What guarantees do we have that bringing back a sample of soil or rock from Mars wouldn't expose this planet to the same catastrophic outcome?

From what I read, scientists are still debating whether those odd fossil-like oddities discovered in meteoric fragments from Mars are actually petrified bacteria.

I think it makes a lot of sense to take every possible precaution when it comes to bringing stuff back from Mars. It might even be a good idea to do the initial analysis up in the ISS just in case it's really bad news. After all, how do we know that we could actually contain a pathogen such as that which might be returned from the red planet?

Is it really worth the risk?

Re:Dangerous stuff

[LadyLucky]

See, I tend to think the opposite. Life on earth has spent millions of years adapting to our environment, adapting to be more and more efficient at doing bad stuff to us. I think it would be highly unlikely that any given virus would have any potency in a terrestrial environment. After all, there is nothing inherent about a particular virus that makes it deadly, it is just that its interactions with our bodies cause ill effects.

I would have thought extra-terrestrial life is likely to have the same kind of effect on us as we would on them. If we can't survive over there, why could they survive here? All in all, it is more like a roll of the evolutionary dice, in a game where the possibilities are huge, and the successful species very few. Not only that, but they have to be more successful than the ones on earth that have evolved already.

This is a job for the space station

[corebreech]

Why bring it to Earth? Just bring it to the Space Station.

Specifically, you have the returning space probe enter Earth orbit. A service vehicle is then dispatched to dock with the probe. Part of the service vehicle is designed to serve as a containment module for whatever beasties the probe brought back.

Then the service vehicle navigates back to the space station and docks. The containment module remains off-limits to personnel, all observation/experiments are performed using machines preinstalled in the containment module.

If the beasties start pulling an Andromeda on us, you jettison the module and send it on its way to the Sun.