AS A FORMER MEMBER OF NASA’S PLANETARY PROTECTION SUBCOMMITTEE, I AGREE: Report recommends NASA revise its planetary protection policies.

The report, prepared by a committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine at the request of NASA and published July 2, found that existing policies developed for the Apollo lunar landings and the Viking missions to Mars decades ago don’t fit more advanced missions under development, including Mars sample return and exploration of “ocean worlds” in the outer solar system.

Those policies are intended in part to comply with Article 9 of the Outer Space Treaty, which requires countries to avoid “harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter.” NASA developed policies to avoid contamination of potentially habitable worlds by its spacecraft, and to avoid contaminating the Earth’s environment with any materials those spacecraft return.

The committee concluded that while the central tenets of planetary protection policy, including its basis in the Outer Space Treaty and use of international cooperation, remain viable today, “the current planetary protection policy development process is inadequate to respond to progressively more complex solar system exploration missions, especially in an environment of significant programmatic constraints.”

Read the whole thing. We don’t want potentially-dangerous organisms traveling in either direction.