ABOVE: Technicians and engineers wear clean-room clothing to inspect the Curiosity Mars rover during a drive test. Concerns about potentially contaminating the red planet with microbes from Earth led to several delays in the rover’s journey on Mars between 2012 and 2016.
NASA
In the 1971 sci-fi thriller The Andromeda Strain, a satellite carrying an alien microbe crashes into Earth. The microbe kills almost everyone in the fictional rural town of Piedmont, New Mexico, leaving scientists frantic to contain the invader, characterize it, and prevent its destruction of the human race. While that plot is somewhat far-fetched, researchers at NASA, other nations’ space agencies, and academic institutions worldwide are working to ensure that missions designed to return asteroid or comet samples to Earth don’t also bring back unwanted alien life. At the same time, they’re working to prevent extremely resilient bacteria from hitching a ride on spacecraft to Mars, the moons ...
