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The overprotection of Mars

Nature Geoscience volume 6, pages 510–511 (2013)Cite this article

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Planetary protection policies aim to guard Solar System bodies from biological contamination from spacecraft. Costly efforts to sterilize Mars spacecraft need to be re-evaluated, as they are unnecessarily inhibiting a more ambitious agenda to search for extant life on Mars.

The mission of NASA's Office of Planetary Protection is to protect Solar System bodies — including planets, moons, comets and asteroids — from contamination by Earth life, and to protect Earth from possible life forms that may be returned from other Solar System bodies1. To accomplish these objectives, the programme absorbs a meagre amount of the NASA budget when viewed in its entirety. But the budget for a specific mission to Mars can substantially increase if its landing site is designated by the Office of Planetary Protection as a region of potential astrobiological interest — the so-called 'special regions' — in which, theoretically, Mars life could exist and/or Earth life could survive2. Indeed, other space agencies have also developed similar costly strategies to avoid the contamination of Mars with terrestrial microorganisms onboard spacecraft3.

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Figure 1: Protecting Mars from Earth contamination.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Alberto G. Fairén is at the Department of Astronomy, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA,

    Alberto G. Fairén

  2. Dirk Schulze-Makuch is at the School of the Environment, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington 99164, USA,

    Dirk Schulze-Makuch

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  1. Alberto G. Fairén
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  2. Dirk Schulze-Makuch
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Correspondence to Alberto G. Fairén.

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Fairén, A., Schulze-Makuch, D. The overprotection of Mars. Nature Geosci 6, 510–511 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1866

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