When Carl Sagan imagined sending humans to Mars in his book The Cosmic Connection, published in 1973, he posed a problem beyond the cost and complexity of this mission: the possibility that life already exists on the Red Planet and that it might not play a good role. .
“It is possible that there are pathogens on Mars,” he wrote, “living organisms that, if transported to the terrestrial environment, could cause enormous biological damage – a Mars epidemic.”
Michael Crichton imagined a related scenario in his novel The Andromeda Dynasty.
Such situations, in which extraterrestrial samples contain dangerous Tagalong organisms, are examples of reverse pollution, or the danger of substances from other worlds that are harmful to the Earth’s biosphere.
“The possibility of such pathogens is likely to be small, but we cannot even take a small risk with the lives of a billion people,” Sagan wrote.
Scholars have long viewed Sagan’s warnings from a mostly hypothetical perspective. But over the next decade, they will begin to act concretely on lagging pollution risks. NASA and the European Space Agency are preparing for a joint mission called Mars Sample Return. The spacecraft on the Red Planet is currently collecting material that will be collected by other spacecraft and eventually returning it to Earth.
No one can say for sure that such material would not contain the young inhabitants of Mars. If this happens, then no one can say for sure that it is not harmful to earthlings.
With such concerns in mind, NASA should act as if samples from Mars could spawn the next pandemic. “Because it’s not a zero percent chance, we’re doing everything we can to make sure there is no possibility of contamination,” said Andrea Harrington, curator of Mars samples at NASA. Thus, the agency plans to treat returned samples similarly to how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention treats Ebola: carefully.
“With caution” in this case means that once Martian samples fall to Earth, they must initially be kept in a structure called the Sample Receiving Facility. Mission planners say the hull must meet a standard known as “Biosafety Level 4,” or BSL-4, which means it can safely contain the most dangerous pathogens known to science. But it must also be pure: functionally, a giant clean room prevents materials on Earth from contaminating samples taken from Mars.
The agency has a little time to waste: If a sample return mission happens on time — admittedly an “if” — Martian rocks could land on Earth by the mid-2000s. Building a facility that can safely contain Martian material could take the same amount of time, if built according to schedule, uninterrupted by political or public challenges.
With no existing laboratory clean enough for NASA, four scientists, including Dr. Harrington, went on a tour of some of the most dangerous facilities on the planet. She was joined by three of her colleagues, calling themselves the “NASA Tiger Rama Team”. While this nickname sounds like the name of the Military Scouting Team, it is an abbreviation of the team members’ first names – Richard Mattingly of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Andrea Harrington Michael Calaway, contractor at Johnson Space Center; and Alvin Smith, also of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The group visited hotspots such as the Emerging National Laboratories for Infectious Diseases in Boston, the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention whose vaguely named Building 18 in Atlanta.
In all, the team visited 18 facilities that dealt with biological horrors, kept rooms spotless, or made innovative equipment for either purpose. Members were hoping to see what worked in current laboratories and what the NASA facility could fit or improve to keep humanity safe.
For scholars like Harrington, the hurry and the hurdles are well worth it. “This will be the first mission to return a sample from another planet,” she said. In other words, the first time another world met humans, because humans were introduced to them.
Materials from all over the solar system came to Earth for study before: moon rocks and dust from American, Soviet and Chinese expeditions; samples from two asteroids collected by Japanese probes; And particles from the solar wind and a comet collected by a spacecraft. But Mars presents what NASA considers a “significant” reverse pollution risk, so samples taken from the Red Planet fall under a legal category called “restricted Earth return.”
“We have to treat these samples as if they contain dangerous biological materials,” said Nick Benardini, NASA’s planetary protection officer. Benardini oversees policies and programs that attempt to prevent Earth microbes from contaminating planets or moons in our solar system and extraterrestrial matter from harming Earth.
John Rommel, who served two terms in the office between 1987 and 2008, believes it is right for the space agency to take risks seriously, even if they are small and seem like science fiction. “There are important unknowns in terms of biological possibilities,” he said. “A place like Mars is a planet. We don’t know how it works.”
Part of the point of returning a Mars sample, of course, is figuring out how the planet works — something that can’t be done properly on site because scientists and their many tools can’t travel there yet. The task has already begun. NASA’s Persevere spacecraft, which arrived at Mars in 2021, is collecting and buffering samples for future capture. The samples will then be transported by the same vehicle or a robotic helicopter to the missile landing craft. Their rocket will then launch into Mars orbit, where a European-made spacecraft will pick up the material and send it back toward Earth.
Once the spacecraft approaches this pale blue point, optimistically in 2033, the samples will drop into the desert of the vast Utah Test and Training Area, Earth’s own Mars region. Then, scientists can study the samples using the heavy-duty instruments that Earth laboratories allow.
Tiger Team RAMA’s mission was to figure out how to make the risk of contamination more of an opportunity than a problem. Their goal was to research what existing, clean facilities had to offer and what the space agency might have to invent.
“We wanted to understand what the state of the country was,” Harrington said.
To find out, the team visited seven high-containment labs in the United States, one in Britain and one in Singapore, as well as ultrapure space labs in Japan and Europe. They also visited manufacturers of equipment in these facilities, and those of model laboratories.
The biggest technological challenge is that the sample receiving facility must fulfill two intersecting purposes. “Earth does not touch the sample,” Meyer said. This is the goal of creating a clean and pure facility: to prevent materials on Earth from contaminating Martian materials and from giving false signals to scientific studies.
“And the samples don’t touch the ground” – the lag pollution, he continued. The function of the high containment lab: keeping what’s inside and inside.
Clean rooms require positive air pressure, which means that the internal pressure is higher than the external pressure. Air always flows, then, from the inside out—from a higher pressure to a lower pressure. It’s exactly what air does, because physics. Particles are ejected by force, but not entered by force.
However, the high containment modulus operates in the opposite direction. They maintain negative air pressure, with the pressure inside their walls being lower than outside. Particles can seep inside, but they can’t infiltrate.
NASA needs a positive pressure space to keep samples clean and a negative pressure space to hold samples. It is difficult to combine these conditions in the same physical space. It may require innovative concentric structures and sophisticated ventilation systems. No lab on Earth has done this to the scale that a Martian sample return requires because no lab ever needs to. “We’re not surprised that this doesn’t exist,” Harrington said.
The best Tiger Team RAMA can do is see how clean and contained facilities have kept themselves that way and hope to figure out the best way to combine them.
Inside the BSL-4 labs the team visited, high-efficiency air filters, or HEPAs, were ubiquitous. The team learned about sanitizing practices, such as bathing tools in gaseous hydrogen peroxide fumes, that kill contaminants on surfaces. Work remains to be done to find the correct way to sterilize foreign materials. “Research is currently underway to understand decontamination, in the context of these samples,” Harrington said.
In terms of structure, a sample receiving facility can have epoxy floors, ceilings, and walls, such as BSL-4 laboratories and sometimes cleanrooms. By contrast, the pristine room where scientists built a European rover to Mars had walls made of welded stainless steel, a material also approved for the infrastructure of the BSL-4 facility. Both materials can serve dual purposes for NASA.
Tiger Team RAMA has also investigated the tools in Earth-centered cleanrooms that scientists can use to handle Martian samples: Microscopes, glove boxes, and robots such as “micromanipulators” allow researchers to manipulate the material with precision and without hand contact with the sample. Scientists studied the materials remotely in pure nitrogen environments, to avoid their degradation, which NASA will also need.
But problems arose in the details, showing where the state’s case would not work well for NASA. Many existing labs were less than 1,000 square feet — way too small for the scale the job required. High thresholds or narrow doorways made it difficult to get equipment in and out. And the current BSL-4 laboratories are California’s critical facilities hotels: what’s scored isn’t usually left, at least not without extensive—and sometimes devastating—decontamination. As such, they usually have less hardware than the average lab. Part of the point of returning the Martian sample is the ability to take advantage of advanced scientific instrumentation.
In the end, the team offered some possibilities for NASA about what shape the Mars sample facility might take: The agency could change the current BSL-4 laboratory to be more pure. Or perhaps the agency requires more money and time, and can build a new brick-and-mortar facility out of the ground, uniquely designed for its purposes. NASA is also considering mid-range options, such as building a cheaper, modular, high-containment facility and dumping it inside a hard-shell building.
“There is a lot that is still on the table as we look at it,” Harrington said.
Whatever NASA decides, the team’s investigation suggested that the process of designing and building a typical study site could take 8 to 12 years — pushing the timeline for an actual sample return. Given this, team members recommended that NASA make certain plans almost now.
–
Part of the reason to avoid delays is that there will almost certainly be setbacks. The laboratories visited by Tiger Team RAMA faced bureaucratic interruptions, caused by new regulatory requirements, fluctuations in government funds, construction difficulties, and incomplete public participation.
The team determined that the potential for delay represented a “significant software risk” to the Martian sample yield. After all, returning is likely to be more complicated, in terms of paperwork, than that of purely ground-based projects.
NASA wants its project to comply with international planetary protection policies in addition to its complementary policies. The sample receiving facility must also be approved through the National Environmental Policy Act process, which requires the issuance of an Environmental Impact Statement. In addition, the spacecraft and its internal facilities may have to deal with Presidential National Security Directive 25, which governs science and technology experiments that may have significant environmental impacts. This is not to neglect the official interest from the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services with the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and possibly other state and local governments.
But the team found that engaging with the public, not just government agencies, was also a key factor for the project’s success. Rommel said being transparent with the public is key not only to winning public support but also to keeping it accountable and safe. “Total openness is the only thing that will make this business successful, which means you have to do the right thing,” he said.
“If you think you have something of this that you should keep a secret, you shouldn’t do it,” he added.
Facility builders will have to consider the public interest, not just research, when communicating. When Scott Hanton, managing editor of the publication Lab Manager, thinks of the perception and communication challenges that NASA will face with the Sample Receiving Facility, two acronyms come to mind: NIMBY and WIIFM. Not in my backyard and what’s inside of it for me, which has to be balanced.
Hunton believes that the answer to the last question must come from the evaluator’s personal point of view. “It’s not just from the perspective of the world to learn something new,” he said. “But why should the neighborhood, the region, the state and the state take this investment and this danger?”
The presence of community advisory groups that intentionally include audio critics – what he calls the “bandits on the train” situation – can create goodwill.
However, Hunton sees, in this extraterrestrial danger, an earthly blessing. “I feel like it’s a new problem,” he said. “You will need a new answer.” NASA’s investment in building a secure facility can improve Biolab overall.
“There are going to be very interesting technical challenges, and that could, frankly, provide more benefit to humanity than anything they learn from the sample,” he said.
Harrington, of course, is excited about the samples. Mars is a geological and environmental time capsule, revealing what the Earth was like eons ago. “We’re really going to be able to tell a lot about the evolution of the Earth,” Harrington said.
It could bring us a small step closer to understanding how, for example, a planet produces beings that produce spacecraft that travel to another world and then return that world to this world.