By far the most volatile and dirty thing to enter the pristine halls of the astromaterials curatorial labs are the scientists themselves. Human beings are walking dust creators – like the Pig Pen character in the Peanuts comic strips – and are covered in oils. There are two basic approaches to eliminating them from the equation: specialized suits, or, better yet, robots. It's a matter of course that anyone working in these labs would wear a completely self-contained "bunny suit" and handle samples only through a glovebox -- a container with rubber gloves reaching in from mounts on the sides.

But those gloves are often composed of the very plastics Allton worries about. J. I. Ziemlewski, and Karen M. McNamara of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and C. B. Agee and E. K. Stansbery of the Johnson Space Center designed gloves with a Mars mission in mind. They drew inspiration from the Centers for Disease Control's equipment for dealing with pathogens like Ebola, but strove for more chemical purity.

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Teflon seems to be the best solution for an outer layer and some internal linings, but the gloves must have four more layers. The layers must maintain lower pressure than that on either side of the glove, seal a separation barrier, insulate the human hands from the samples' –30ºC Martian temperatures, and another pressure barrier suitable for human hands.

One innovation proposed is to have a layer of honeycomb structures supported by pillars to hold a void space (perhaps augmented by a vacuum pump) while complicating the path of particles. But at low temperatures the honeycomb becomes inflexible. Pumping a warm gas through the honeycomb should help overcome that problem, the authors of a paper describing their work wrote. But Allton notes that the problem of condensation might still prove difficult.

All this contributes to the elaborate glove design, "we're working to convert the glovebox into a cryogenic system, but it's very difficult for people to work in an cryogenic environment," remarked Carlton Allen, the curator. The ideal remains a robotic arm within the glovebox. But again, even the exacting standards of microchip automation aren't up to NASA's standards. While factory robots can repeat assigned tasks endlessly with precision, scientists examining samples from space can't guess what size, weight, shape, composition and integrity the objects to be handle by a robotic arm are to be.

Oceaneering International's space systems division provided the world's smallest commercially available robotic arm, originally designed for remote surgery, for that sealed environment.

The twelve-inch arm, called the OM3 (Oceaneering Multipurpose Micro-Manipulator) is designed to keep its actuators and plastic parts outside of the box – it operates like a puppet with cables extending to motors outside. Keeping motors away also precludes the chance that iron-rich deposits in Mars rocks might be hidden by magnetic anomalies in the arm, and keeps heat sources from corrupting the sample material, which would weigh at most about a pound. And too add delicacy and accuracy, according to Kent Copeland, program manager for Oceaneering, "harmonic drives have been implemented to remove backlash in joint movements." Teflon grease is used to lubricate the system, and the arm will be sheathed in Teflon.

Inside the box, the OM3 can guide sample rocks under a splitter, which is currently controlled by a human under human muscle power – its just a handle outside the box. But the robotic arm would handle sifters, baggers, and power needed at the end of the instrument would be provided pneumatically to avoid the magnetic, heat and other motor problems again.

This all seems reasonable for a place like Mars, or perhaps even for a comet sample. Even a Europa probe bringing back water is manageable, Allton says, because water is uniform in all directions. In some ways, it would be an easier sample – scientists are quite used to examining water through glass and plastic. But what if a sampler in the expected vast ocean of Europa caught a fish or a worm in its volume of water? Suddenly, the mission of curation would turn to dissection.

"My thoughts have been bounded a bit by handling rock samples," Allton says. And as far as life goes, "I confess I had not given any thought at all to stuff you could see." Allen looks to rapid gains in robotic surgery technology to deal with such surprises.

"That wouldn’t be the slowest thing in technology to catch up to our needs," Allen says.

But Oceaneering isn't as positive about a quick turnaround. "This is certainly a possibility, although a pair of the arms would likely be necessary to provide adequate dexterity in such an application," opines Copeland. "If the need arose, the difficult tasks would not be building the arm, but defining, designing, and developing the tool suite used for worm surgery. Depending on the tasks desired and tool suite required, that duration could be anywhere from a month to several months."