White House releases planetary protection strategy — December 30, 2020
WASHINGTON — The White House released a national strategy for planetary protection Dec. 30, outlining new assessments to prevent terrestrial contamination of other worlds and vice versa.
The National Strategy for Planetary Protection, developed by an interagency working group led by the National Space Council and Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), outlines work to be done over the next year to update planetary protection policies, considering both scientific advances as well as growing private capabilities in space exploration.
The strategy is designed to implement a portion of the updated National Space Policy, released Dec. 9, that calls on OSTP, in cooperation with NASA and other agencies, to develop new planetary protection guidelines “working with scientific, commercial, and international partners, for the appropriate protection of planetary bodies and Earth from harmful biological contamination.”
“Current and future missions to Mars and other destinations necessitate a strategy to support a safe, sustainable, and predictable Earth and space environment,” Scott Pace, executive secretary of the National Space Council, said in a statement. “By establishing objectives for the implementation of the 2020 National Space Policy’s direction on planetary protection, this strategy continues American leadership in scientific discovery, human exploration, and private sector space activities.”
The planetary protection strategy has three broad objectives. One is to create a “risk assessment and science-based guidelines” for mitigating what’s known as “forward contamination,” or contamination of other worlds by terrestrial life. It also directs an assessment of the role of planetary protection in the government’s payload review process for private missions.
A second objective seeks to avoid “backward contamination,” or potential contamination of the Earth by any extraterrestrial life. The strategy directs agencies to develop various frameworks for assessing risks of sample return missions and other sources of backward contamination, as well as an approval framework for such missions and procedures for safely handling materials returned from beyond Earth.
A third objective seeks to incorporate private sector views on planetary protection issues given the growing capabilities of, and interest by, companies in flying missions to other worlds, in particular Mars. That objective includes work by the government to develop guidelines for authorization and continuing supervision of private sector missions to destinations with planetary protection implications.
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https://spacenews.com/white-house-releases-planetary-protection-strategy/