Skip to main content

NASA's planetary protection officer | Popular Science

[ad_1]


Lisa Pratt was nearly 2 miles below ground in a South African gold mine when the lights went off and the air stopped moving. Power had cut out, along with the reassuring roar of the ventilating fans that regulate the mine’s methane and carbon monoxide levels. Pratt, then an Indiana University ­geology professor, was hunting for evidence of life-forms capable of ­surviving in extreme dark, salinity, and temperature. As miners began to pour from a crease in the rock above her and run for the exit, it was clear that humans weren’t on that list. “It was not a good moment,” she recalls of that day in 2001. “I honestly thought that might be the end of the line.”



Today, Pratt’s work in such environments has led her to a brightly lit office at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., as the agency’s planetary protection officer. In this sparse room with a laptop and a whiteboard, she still ponders a question she faced during her years of crawling, sliding, and rappelling into harsh places to collect extremophiles: “How do you look for signs of life without inadvertently bringing life with you?”



Pratt’s answer will influence everything from spacecraft construction to interplanetary flight plans. Her core mission is this: Keep Earth’s hardiest microbes from hitching rides on equipment we send to places like Mars, and try to stop native critters (if they do in fact exist) from thumbing a ride back.



Since the launch of the satellite age, most space-faring nations have adhered to strict contamination-control guidelines set up by the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR). These don’t call for complete sterilization—an impossibility without damaging a spacecraft’s materials and electronics. Instead, they rely on a probabilistic approach that tries to minimize the likelihood of a tough little microbe making its way to another world. To achieve that, Pratt is working with NASA engineers and mission planners to ensure these guidelines are met as the agency constructs new spacecraft.


“Everybody has played well together on this,” Pratt insists, “at least until just recently.” By that she means Elon Musk. In February, his private company, SpaceX, sent a ­(microbe-​laden) Tesla Roadster hurtling through space. While it’s unlikely to collide with any planet in the next 100,000 years, Pratt still lets out an exasperated groan when the topic comes up, and launches into a long list of all ­planetary-​protection protocols that SpaceX ignored.



Pratt doesn’t have the power to slap Musk with a fine for cleanliness infractions, but she can try to convince companies like his that protocols matter. With SpaceX planning to deliver mining and life-support materials to Mars ahead of what could be actual humans, there’s a new urgency to her mission. “We don’t have any agreements or methods in place to get cargo like that clean,” she says. Over the next several years, working with ­COSPAR and private space companies, Pratt will try to formulate agreements and guidelines for ­public- and private-sector space powers.


She doesn’t have much time. Once ­humans carrying microbes step onto Mars, a key opportunity for discovering new life will end. And even then, what if we do find life out there? While momentous, it won’t necessarily trigger a global embrace. “Earth as a whole is going to say, ‘Sorry, until we know enough about it to be certain it’s not dangerous, you can’t bring it home,’” she says. “You can’t just bring a Mars pet back with you.”



This article was originally published in the Winter 2018 Danger issue of Popular Science.




[ad_2]

Written By Bryan Gardiner

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

Humans flourished through a supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago (so you can make it through Tuesday)

[ad_1] About 74,000 years ago, a large chunk of a Pacific island exploded. It sent ash and other debris around the world, including to the southern tip of Africa, where it would be found by a team of international scientists and entered as the latest data point in one of the hottest debates in paleoanthropology ( I know ): Did the Toba supervolcano thrust our planet into a 1,000-year volcanic winter, thus bottle-necking animals and plants alike? Or was it just a little blip on our historic radar? That’s the contentious arena into which our intrepid researchers venture, this time with a new study in Nature establishing that humans in modern-day South Africa not only survived, but flourished after the Toba eruption. Where once was (we think, maybe) a mountain, there is now a huge caldera with a lake inside, and an island inside that. Their evidence shows that debris from the explosion landed 9,000 kilometers (5592.3 miles) away, the farthest distance traveled ever recorded for the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

These 1950s experiments showed us the trauma of parent-child separation. Now experts say they're too unethical to repeat—even on monkeys.

[ad_1] John Gluck’s excitement about studying parent-child separation quickly soured. He’d been thrilled to arrive at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the late 1960s, his spot in the lab of renowned behavioral psychologist Harry Harlow secure. Harlow had cemented his legacy more than a decade earlier when his experiments showed the devastating effects of broken parent-child bonds in rhesus monkeys. As a graduate student researcher, Gluck would use Harlow’s monkey colony to study the impact of such disruption on intellectual ability. Gluck found academic success, and stayed in touch with Harlow long after graduation. His mentor even sent Gluck monkeys to use in his own laboratory. But in the three years Gluck spent with Harlow—and the subsequent three decades he spent as a leading animal researcher in his own right—his concern for the well-being of his former test subjects overshadowed his enthusiasm for animal research. Separating parent and child,...
Post a Comment
Read more