Questions tagged [forward-contamination]
Forward contamination is the transfer of microbial life from Earth to another celestial body. For the reverse process, see: back contamination.
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Are any space agencies working on an (essentially) 100% reliable sterilization technique for spacecraft bound for subsurface ocean worlds?
One answer to my previous question Is there any demonstrated or even proposed technology that can sterilize a spacecraft with 100% certainty and yet leave it electronically functional? asserts:
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Who decided that a <1 in 10,000 probability of contaminating the europan ocean by a viable Earth microorganism was legally and ethically sufficient?
In comments below Is there any demonstrated or even proposed technology that can sterilize a spacecraft with 100% certainty and yet leave it electronically functional? there is a link to Europa Lander ...
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Is there any demonstrated or even proposed technology that can sterilize a spacecraft with 100% certainty and yet leave it electronically functional?
In this answer to Why are there no robotic missions on Europa or Enceladus I wrote:
Missions going through the ice and into the ocean are currently hypothetical and problematic. You need a lot of ...
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Life on Mars: How do we know it is not from Earth?
Firstly I would like to start the question with the knowledge that we have, that the most basic form of life we want and expect to find in our Solar System is the primitive kind, such as viruses or ...
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Will transit time render Mars disease free?
It's going to take us a few months to travel to mars in our spaceships. Will the relatively small size of the ship combined with a few months of "isolation" result in Mars being disease free until ...
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Why were blood and hair follicles from 25 people put on the Moon?
The Wired.com article A Crashed Israeli Lunar Lander Spilled Tardigrades on the Moon says:
Spivack had planned to send DNA samples to the moon in future versions of the lunar library, not on this ...
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Why send tardigrades to the moon if we have actively avoided contaminating other worlds? [duplicate]
In 2017, we sent Cassini crashing into Saturn to avoid contamination
"The spacecraft will burn up and disintegrate like a meteor in the upper atmosphere of Saturn," Preston Dyches, of NASA'...
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Why would the Apollo Lunar Module pressure dump (to space?) valve have a bacterial filter?
This answer to Why did they bother closing the hatch on the LM while doing EVA? links to a transcript of Apollo 11 which contains the following (find it there by searching for "radiative"):
109:41:...
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How are interplanetary spacecraft protected from biological contamination while being integrated on their launchers?
After having been disinfected in some NASA lab for forward planetary protection reasons, how are spacecraft stored and brought to the launch pad and loaded into the fairings, in order to prevent them ...
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Chang'e- 4 safeguards to biological Contamination on the moon?
What kinds of safeguards does Chang'e 4, China's lander on the dark side of the moon use, in order to prevent biological contamination on the moon?
How well are they documented?
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What are the sanctions to prevent Mars being polluted with human corpses?
Are there international laws or agreements to prevent Mars being polluted with human corpses?
If there are, are they underpinned with possible sanction?
Isn't it appropriate to make a distinction ...
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Are not crash landings on Mars violating the Planetary Protection rules?
Are not the chances considerable that the crash landing of the Schiaparelli lander has contaminated the subsurface of Mars with microbes ?
For Mars there are 3 categories of Planetary Protection ...
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Is Curiosity allowed to investigate the subsurface of the "clay unit " near Mount Sharp?
From the bottom image in this article from september 2016 it can be seen that there was a possible path for Curiosity in the direction of Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons).
At the end of januari 2018 however ...
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Standards of "clean" for artifacts launched into space
When the Viking landers, and the Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity rovers were built and prepared for launch, they would have had to be made as free of Earth microbes (living or not) as ...
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Why do we worry about contaminating some solar bodies but not others?
On 15th September 2017, the Cassini probe will be destroyed by crashing it into Saturn. This will be done in order to eliminate the unlikely risk of it crashing into and forward contaminating one of ...
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Probable future tech to sterilize an EVA suit as it is being worn
As far as I've been able to find (please correct me if I am wrong!), there is no current technology that would permit an EVA suit that is being worn to be sterilized without risk of damage to the suit ...
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How would a manned Mars mission keep from contaminating Mars?
It occurred to me that EVAs on the Martian surface would be liable to bring biologicals from Earth out into the Martian environment. A habitat will become contaminated with bacteria from the humans ...
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What are the valid arguments for forward contamination, given the uniqueness of proteins?
What is the scientific foundation for the hypothesis that human space exploration accidentally could spread Earth life to e.g. Mars and cause contamination which is indistinguishable from any ...
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How would we sterilize a probe to look for life? [duplicate]
If we were to ever send a probe to check for life then it's of paramount importance that we do not contaminate the target site with Earth organisms. And if there's anything we've learned from ...
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Does Mars One plan on taking precautions to ensure the Martian environment is not contaminated with Earth biota?
We have seen in these questions that one of the primary concerns in sending humans (or anything for that matter, but especially humans) to Mars is contamination of the Martian environment:
How would ...
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Is 'Mars One' a one-way mission for fear of infecting Earth with unknown pathogens?
Will the Mars One mission team be testing samples to know for sure that there are no deadly viruses on Mars?
If there are no viruses, will this pave the way for Mars travel?
What would be the ...
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How is equipment sterilized for space missions?
This refers to the sterilization of space exploring tools like rovers and probes.
It is important to not send out rovers that contain any bacteria, because another rover, from another mission, could ...
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Could any life from Earth survive in Enceladus' oceans?
Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of Saturn, is probably unique in being the only body in our solar system besides Earth (and possibly Europa) to have significant amounts of liquid water. Most of this ...
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