Russia is pushing forward on a robotic mission to Mars dubbed Phobos-Grunt
- now seemingly on a countdown clock that ticks away for an October launch.
If the project is on track and off the ground by that time, Phobos-Grunt
would arrive at the red planet in August of next year.
The project also includes deployment of a Chinese sub-satellite -Yinghuo-1
meaning "Firefly-1" - that will gauge the Martian past in terms of how surface
water on the red planet did a disappearing act.
Phobos-Grunt is intended also to cast an orbital eye on Mars too, but
then plop down on Phobos - one of that planet's two moons, scrape up
on-the-spot samples and then transport those extraterrestrial tidbits to Earth
in July 2012. As it swoops by Earth, the spacecraft is to release a capsule containing
all the samples gathered on Phobos, to land on Earth.
But what caught my eye was another payload on this heady mission - detailed
in a couple of recent articles - that Russia is also dispatching on the flight
the "world's hardiest" or "toughest" organisms found here on Earth, sealed up
in a bio-container for the Earth-to-Mars/Mars to Earth three year trek. The bio-module will provide
30 small tubes for individual microbe samples.
That's LIFE
Turns out that The Planetary Society is at the root of this "hardy boys
go to Mars" saga - dubbed LIFE, short for Living Interplanetary Flight
Experiment.
LIFE is intended to help better understand
the nature of life, its robustness, and its ability - or not - to move
between planets. The journey will be a test of one facet of the "transpermia"
hypothesis. That is, the possibility that life can voyage from planet to planet
inside rocks blasted off one planetary surface by impact, to land on another
planetary surface.
I guess what set off my buzzer was lobbing
organisms toward Mars, on purpose, given that lots of effort - and money -
is involved in preventing hitchhiking microbes from Earth making it to the red
planet in the first place.
It is called forward contamination.
Under The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, planetary protection
policies are in place to prevent cross contamination between planets - avoiding
both forward contamination on outbound spacecraft, and back contamination of
Earth upon return. For this mission, it's the possibility of forward
contamination that raises concerns.
International
protocols
So I shot an email over to Lou Friedman, he's the Executive Director of
The Planetary Society, asking him to allay concerns
about forward contamination.
"I guess the most important thing I
can say to 'allay concerns' is that...us and the Russians with whom we are
working with are committed to observing the international protocols and agreements
concerning planetary protection," he told SPACE.com.
"The main point is the product of
probabilities of this experiment even entering Mars, let alone breaking up and
then dispersing organisms in a way that they could survive on Mars is
incredibly small - orders of magnitude less than the minimum allowed in the international
science protocols," Friedman advised.
As
broached in The Planetary Society's Frequently Asked Questions about the
mission: Is it likely that this experiment could contaminate Mars with life,
thus confusing future searches for life on Mars?
"The
short answer is that it is very unlikely, but we are doing a thorough analysis
of the issue. We will fully comply with the COSPAR (Committee on Space Research
of the International Council for Science) planetary protection guidelines aimed
at preventing the contamination of Mars by introducing terrestrial life onto
the surface of Mars."
Preliminary passenger list
On the
other hand, there are some other aspects of this that still ring an alarm bell
in some quarters. For example:
- Since it's a Russian
launch vehicle, and not going to the surface of Mars per se, the concerns
about planetary protection are less stringent. However, if an out-of-control
spacecraft impacts on the planet, that would be bad. How would NASA
respond if it were a U.S. launch vehicle with the same experiment?
- Okay, let's hope
they are successful. Even so, if the experimental organisms make
it back alive, it says that organisms are hardy (there's a high duh
factor!) and if they die, there's no way to interpret the data in a
useful way.
- The Phobos-Grunt
mission intends to meet orbital lifetime requirements, so by COSPAR policy
there is no official limit on the number of organisms the spacecraft may carry.
However, I've been advised that neither the COSPAR nor NASA planetary
protection officials think that sending organisms so close to Mars is a good idea,
given the trouble the U.S. normally goes through to ensure that Mars spacecraft
are very clean.
- A critical
question involves the specific organisms that will be transported. Both The
Planetary Society and the Russian National Academy have been advised to send
only "pure cultures of organisms" that could not possibly
survive on Mars, selected so that they would pose a minimal contamination
hazard. By the way, most organisms relevant to human exploration, such as
well-studied human commensal microbes and food organisms, meet this criterion.
- A preliminary
passenger list on the LIFE experiment included a section of tundra taken from
the Russian far north. Of all locations on Earth that could possibly contain
organisms capable of adapting to Martian conditions, this is one of the most
likely. However, The Planetary
Society website indicates that the final passenger list is not yet in
place. But the description still states that "a natural soil colony of
microbes" will be included. What's up here, and what's really up and going?
- At the end of
the day, will the Russians comply with the spirit or letter of the COSPAR
Planetary Protection Policy when analyzing the potential for harm? And in not
doing this, would they undercut COSPAR policy?
Native
tundra samples
I also
contacted Catharine
Conley, the acting Planetary Protection Officer at NASA Headquarters about this
mission.
"The
Phobos-Grunt mission intends to meet orbital lifetime requirements, so by
COSPAR policy there is no official limit on the number of organisms the
spacecraft may carry," Conley advised. Sending pure cultures of organisms
that could not possibly survive on Mars, she added, would pose a minimal contamination
hazard, and this includes most organisms relevant to human exploration.
"However, I
am uncomfortable with sending native tundra samples so close to Mars, because
this is a location on Earth that could possibly contain organisms capable of
adapting to Martian conditions," and to do so "seems ill-advised," Conley told SPACE.com.
For another sanity
check, I asked John Rummel, Director of the Institute for Coastal Science &
Policy at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina for his thoughts.
He's also COSPAR Planetary Protection Panel Chair.
"The Planetary Society,
as a public space advocacy group, is looking for a publicly noticeable way to
demonstrate that live organisms can make the journey from Earth to Mars and
return. Scientifically, however, I think that the hypothesis has already been
sufficiently supported by previous work on Earth and in near-Earth space,"
Rummel told SPACE.com.
"As the COSPAR Planetary Protection Panel Chair, I would judge that the threat
of contaminating Mars is negligible - but I would emphasize that the Russian
Academy of Sciences is the organization that should be making that
determination for a Russian-launched payload, judging both the potential for
contaminating Mars and the safety of returning samples of Phobos to Earth."
So space fans: Is the
Phobos-Grunt mission something to groan about?
Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than
four decades. He is past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad
Astra and Space World magazines and has written for SPACE.com since 1999.
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