The cost of sterilizing spacecraft for Mars is just too damn high, researchers say. And then there is the issue of how bad we are at it anyway.
At NASA, there is an entire office dedicated to preventing any living Earth creatures (think bacteria, not people) from inadvertently landing on other planets. But two astrobiologists argue in the latest Nature Geoscience that the Office of Planetary Protection–which functions sort of like the EPA of space–should give up trying to fully sterilize spacecraft for Mars. If transfers of life to Mars are even possible, Alberto Fairén and Dirk Schulze-Makuch write, it’s probably already happened.
“If Earth life cannot thrive on Mars, we don’t need any special cleaning protocol for our spacecraft,” Fairén wrote Co.Exist in an email. “And if Earth life actually can survive on Mars, it most likely already does, after 4 billion years of meteoritic transport and four decades of spacecraft investigations not always following sterilization procedures.”
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