Source: The Washington Post
In H.G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds,” Earth’s unwitting defense against the Martian hordes comes in the form of pathogenic bacteria to which the invaders lack immunity.
In reality, earthlings have created an international network whose next great mission is to protect potentially fragile Martian life, should there be any, from earthly contamination.
Catharine “Cassie” Conley, the planetary protection officer at NASA — and possessor of perhaps the coolest title in the federal government — is in charge of that mission for the United States, and as a result is part of a small global team charged with keeping space exploration as clean as possible.
Conley is quick to joke that the coolest title at NASA actually came in the old days when agency divisions had simple names — Sun, Earth, Planets, Universe and so on — and there was a “director, Universe.”
But her job is as serious as a NASA post can be. In addition to protecting potential extraterrestrial life and monitoring for contamination on trips back to Earth, the protection office oversees protocols that assure Earth ships are sterile enough on departure that if they do find evidence of anything living, it won’t be some Earth-based organism that was missed during the cleaning process and dragged across the solar system.
Also important is logging which pathogens humans might be carrying at launch, so that if someone gets sick on the way back from a theoretical future trip to Mars, NASA can quickly determine whether it’s a garden-variety human bug or some new kind of Martian flu turning a homeward-bound space vehicle into a “plague ship.”
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