![]() ![]() ![]() The hardware used to expose the tardigrades to outer space. Despite these measures, the strict rules required to ensure planetary protection has already been breached. ![]() The national agencies are extremely careful about decontaminating their spacecraft, and have dedicated facilities to acquire, process, store and study extraterrestrial materials without precautions taken to ensure that the Earth, in turn, will not be contaminated. There is precedent for the warnings of the scientists. The Israeli Beresheet lander crashed into the Moon in 2019, while the Hakuto-R mission from Japan also impacted the lunar surface while landing in 2022. While private spaceflight companies may not be getting to Mars just yet, a number of private companies are getting close to reaching the Moon, especially the companies that attempted to bag the Google Lunar X Prize. A year later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the Red Dragon missions had been scrapped to focus on the development of the SpaceX Starship, which is designed for multiple takeoffs and landings on planetary surfaces. In 2016, SpaceX made a dramatic plan to launch a pair of Red Dragon pathfinding missions to Mars, that would survey the Red Planet and identify suitable landing zones for building up the first human colony outside Earth. Private space companies that intend to get to Mars often fall behind schedules after dramatic announcements. However, the scientists warn that this treaty does not provide adequate protection as world governments do not have the authority to regulate the missions of private spaceflight companies.Ĭoncept of the SpaceX Red Dragon mission to Mars. The Outer Space Treaty signed by 113 nations emphasises the need to prevent contamination between planetary bodies. However, if Martian life is unrelated, introducing biocontaminants could risk altering or losing precious evidence of alien coevolution and the transition from prebiotic chemistry to biochemistry.”Īlso Read: Samples collected by Perseverance on Mars are aligned with astrobiology goals Mars, with its limited changes over billions of years, preserves valuable evidence. Moreover, if we are related to Martian life through planetary exchange, studying it will help us understand our ancestral metabolic pathways. One of the study authors, Nathalie Cabrol says, “An origin of life on Mars would have profound implications in our assessment of the probability of life in the universe. Researchers have examined the implications of crewed missions for astrobiology and planetary protection in a comment paper, published in Nature. ![]()
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