By 
January 2nd, 2023
Wait a Minute!
A recent item caught my eye.
Late last month, the ocean-going cruise ship – Viking Orion – was not permitted to pull into dock in Australia.
Over 800 ocean goers have been stranded offshore for nearly a week due to “biofoul” – a condition in which marine growth, a fungus, was carried on the Viking Orion’s hull.
An Australian fisheries department labeled it a “potentially harmful” fungus. The worry was that by introducing this invasive species into a new habitat, that organism could hamper the local biological species thriving in the area.
Image credit: Viking Cruises
Ship-shape steps have been taken by Viking Cruises, although it’s not clear when passengers will set foot back on land.
But more to the point – a space exploration point of view about hauling back samples from Mars.
Extraterrestrial goodies
Now in the works is the multi-nation, multi-billion dollar Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign – a “cache and carry” project for the 2030’s to haul to Earth select specimens of Red Planet soil, rock and atmosphere.
Newly revised Mars Sample Return campaign makes use of a set of machines, including use of helicopters, to collect Martian soil, rock and atmospheric specimens for return to Earth.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The plan is for the Mars samples – roughly a pound of extraterrestrial goodies — to be plopped into the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) in west-central Utah.
The MSR campaign team is developing specific transportation, storage, and curation protocols for the Mars samples, including transportation from the UTTR point of recovery to the yet-to-be-determined site of an MSR sample receiving facility.
Public comment
For its part, NASA recently posted for public comment a draft MSR “Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement” or PEIS for short. A 45-day public comment period began on November 4, 2022 and ended on December 19, 2022.
Proposed Utah landing zone (red ellipse) for the Mars sample return mission.
Image credit: NASA
As a result, the PEIS spurred nearly 75 comments.
There’s a mixed bag of support for rocketing back Mars collectibles to our planetary home, and a goodly number of those comments urged not bringing samples back to our home base before testing or studying them on Mars itself.
Others responded by being supportive of using an off-Earth lab, perhaps on the International Space Station, to use “protocols similar to ones described in the Andromeda Strain, minus the nuclear device.”
Another comment remarks: “The arrogance of scientists thinking their containment system is unbreakable reminds me of how the Titanic was supposedly unsinkable. The difference is that at least the Titanic had some lifeboats when it sank; the Earth has none.”
The Andromeda Strain – the 1971 movie, but how real for a 21st century return to Earth of Mars samples?
Credit: Universal Pictures
Miniscule risk
On the other hand, there were those supportive of the MSR endeavor.
“Risk is so small it is not worth it to go about this in a different way that wouldn’t be incredibly expensive. The entire point of this mission is to get the samples back to our state of the art labs, not some makeshift lab in LEO or cis-lunar space,” wrote one commenter.
“I am good with the miniscule risk in the name of science,” continued the person’s remark, “for anything to go wrong there would A) need to be dangerous live pathogens B) could interact with us and C) need to get through all containment protocols. The chances of all that happening is one tick above zero, we have found no life on Mars so the idea these samples would contain dangerous life that can infect species from another planet (Earth) is a bit absurd. Let’s go get them!”
Image credit: NASA/PEIS
Ongoing work
Chiming in on the draft environmental impact statement is the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
“Based on the review of the draft PEIS, EPA did not identify significant environmental concerns to be addressed in the Final EIS,” the December 7, 2022 EPA comment explains.
However, the EPA does note that the draft PEIS references in multiple places that studies regarding burnup/breakup, atmospheric release, contingency planning, and the possibility that Mars material will be distributed outside of the landing site radius are ongoing, and actions to recover MSR Earth Entry System (EES) fragments, if it is damaged upon reentry and landing, are still being worked.
Perseverance rover deposits select rock and soil samples in sealed tubes on Mars’s surface for future missions to retrieve and bring back to Earth for detailed study.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Ship-to-shore signal?
In summary, observes the EPA, more work is to be done.
“We welcome the opportunity to discuss appropriate response authorities with NASA and are available to assist with additional information if required,” the EPA communiqué to NASA concludes.
In the meantime, NASA’s Perseverance rover is busy at work on Mars, scouting about for primo samples that are being cached for eventual pick-up and delivery to Earth-situated labs for intensive scientific inquiry.
Harkening back to the good ship Viking Orion, one wonders whether there’s a strong ship-to-shore signal.
What’s your view?
For more information on the Mars Sample Return and environmental impact comments/studies, go to:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nepa-mars-sample-return-campaign/
Posted in 
Considering that Earth is constantly bombarded with extraterrestrial material in the form of asteroid fragments and lumps of material excavated from Mars BY asteroid fragment impacts leads me to believe that we are actually going many steps beyond what is necessary to protect ourselves in this case.
Though the meteorite argument NASA uses there is widely believed, the NRC Mars Sample Return study in 2009 said that the argument is invalid (close the splash to go straight to the page), page 48
https://www.nap.edu/read/12576/chapter/7#48
QUOTE “The potential hazards posed for Earth by viable organisms surviving in samples is significantly greater with a Mars sample return than if the same organisms were brought to Earth via impact-mediated ejection from Mars”
And then later on the same page in the NRC’s discussion of large scale effects
QUOTE “… Thus it is not appropriate to argue that the existence of martian meteorites on Earth negate the need to treat as potentially hazardous any samples returned from Mars by robotic spacecraft.”
This study is cited by the EIS. But the reader is not told that the NRC in 2009 refuted NASA’s meteorite argument, or told any reason why we should ignore the NRC refutation of their argument.
You can see why it is invalid by considering the example of the invasive freshwater diatom “Didymo” in New Zealand which can’t get from one freshwater lake to another on the same island without human help. It could never get from Earth to Mars and indeed, if there are diatoms on Mars (not impossible for instance in the lakes found beneath the polar ice) they will be independently evolved.
Similarly, there could be life on Mars perfectly adapted to live in an ephemeral briny seep which forms in the late evening / early morning, and rarely transfers to other seeps protected from UV in dust storms, perhaps only succeeding at this every few millennia. As with the diatom example, there is no need for it to have adaptations to extreme shock, vacuum, ability to live in rocks deep below the surface and so on that would let it get to Earth on a meteorite. While a sealed sample tube is like a miniature spaceship complete with a small amount of martian atmosphere not unlike the wet diving gear for “Didymo”.
The argument DOES work for Phobos – the Jaxa team correctly said that it is safe to return samples from Phobos because
1. all our martian meteorites left Mars at least 700,000 years ago for the most recent impact. See table S4 of
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1029/2020JE006523
2. so long as they recover material just from the top few cms on Phobos it has had far more sterilizing radiation than samples ejected from Mars that got here 700,000 years ago.
3. life ejected from Mars can get to Earth protected from the fireball of re-entry so long as it isn’t in the surface layers.
However the JAXA / Sterlim team say on page 4/5 that this does NOT apply to the Mars sample return missions.
For this see page 5 of their study, here (click the X on the splash screen to go straight to the linked page):
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/25357/chapter/2#5
QUOTE MSR material might come from sites that mechanically cannot survive ejection from Mars and thus any putative life-forms would de facto not be able to survive impact ejection and transport to space. Such mechanical limitations do not apply for material collected on Mars.
QUOTE Therefore, the committee finds that the content of this report and, specifically, the recommendations presented in it do not apply to future sample return missions from Mars itself.
The argument presented in the EIS remarkably is refuted on page 5 of the very first cite they present when they talk about ejection from Mars.
I know this meteorite argument is widely believed, especially in the space settlement community but NASA’s own cites in this EIS say emphatically that it is not a valid argument.
I noticed a slight oversight in the JAXA analysis. They argue that they can ignore the effect of the fireball of re-entry to Earth since microbes would be protected if just below the surface of the rock. This is normally a valid argument but it doesn’t work exactly as stated for photosynthetic life as the astrobiologist Charles Cockell found out when he attached photosynthetic life to an aeroshell for re-entry at a typical depth for chroococcidiopsis and found that not only the life but all associated organics were destroyed on re-entry. He concluded
QUOTE … Thus, the planetary exchange of photosynthesis might not be impossible, but quite specific physical situations and/or evolutionary innovations are required to create conditions where a photosynthetic organism happens to be buried deep within a rock during ejection to survive atmospheric transit.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Charles_Cockell/publication/5937888_The_Interplanetary_Exchange_of_Photosynthesis/links/0c960530632bf30e20000000.pdf
However it also turns out that the martian meteorites we have all come from at least 3 meters below the surface of Mars https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1945-5100.2002.tb01033.x
There the normal temperature is below -70 C
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7390930_Adsorption_Water-Related_Potential_Chemical_and_Biological_Processes_in_the_Upper_Martian_Surface#pf3
They all also come from the high southern uplands with craters found for most of them now, the reason being that the air is thinner there so ejection is easier.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1029/2005JE002600
So, for the last 20 million years as far as we can tell meteorites have been ejected only from those very dry high southern uplands where life is unlikely in present day Mars except for in geothermal hot spots, heated caves etc.
Life 3 meters below the surface is not likely to have photosynthetic life unless it is polyextremophile and also able to live without light – and even if capable of photosynthesis, at those depths it would have no reason to be on the surface of ejected rocks.
So the JAXA argument seems to be valid for at least the last 20 million years and so also, its conclusion that it is safe to return samples from those moons.
So it would also be safe to send astronauts there so long as they don’t dig deep or they sterilize any materials that are returned from deep below the surface of Phobos (sterilization advised as there would be a very short transit time from Mars to Phobos of a rock that then ends up deep below the surface).
So Phobos’s moons would seem to be unrestricted category V for sample return missions at least so long as we are careful not to dig deep there – or if we do dig deep, add extra ionization radiation to samples from deep below the surface.
But we can’t say the same about the Martian surface at this time. Though Jezero crater seems uninhabited from orbit, extremophiles live in Mars analogue deserts on Earth in biofilms in microhabitats that you can only discover by close examination.
Also life from distant areas on Earth can be transferred in dust storms with life from the Gobi desert detected in Japan https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018JD029597
The same may happen on Mars especially since the dust storms block out the sun bringing darkness and greatly reducing UV exposure.
These are both mentioned as knowledge gaps in the MEPAG review of 2015
QUOTE “The SR-SAG2 report does not adequately discuss the transport of material in the martian atmosphere. The issue is especially worthy of consideration because if survival is possible during atmospheric transport, the designation of Special Regions becomes more difficult, or even irrelevant.”
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/21816/chapter/4?term=dust#12
“Special regions” there means regions where forwards terrestrial contamination is possible with viable life that could propagate on Mars. This is not a study for backwards contamination so they don’t look into capabilities of extant martian life adapted to the dust storms for billions of years but if there is life there it may well be adapted to spread in dust storms even more so than terrestrial life.
SR-SAG2 is the 2014 study that the EIS relies on to say there won’t be life on Jezero crater if elsewhere on Mars and they don’t cite this 2015 review which overturned that conclusion.
The 2015 MEPAG review also warns about use of maps and says that local microenvironments can be habitable in regions that seem to be uninhabitable on larger scales. This also applies to Jezero crater and means we can’t know it is uninhabitable everywhere without detailed local study looking for microhabitats.
QUOTE Physical and chemical conditions in microenvironments can be substantially different from those of larger scales. Although the SR-SAG2 report considered the microenvironment (Finding 3-10), the implications of the lack of knowledge about microscale conditions was only briefly considered.
The 2015 MEPAG review also has a long section on biofilms and the ability of microbes to modify microhabitats by surrounding themselves with “extrapolymeric substances” – proteins, polysaccharides, lipids, DNA and other molecules.
These EPS can modify the microhabitat and make it much more habitable for microbes and help them cope with stressors in the environment. See page 11:
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/21816/chapter/4#11
Also, if life is returned the sample return studies are emphatic that there IS potential for large scale harm to the environment or human health. It is likely low but not demonstrably zero. Many astrobiologists have expressed this concern going back to Lederberg and Sagan. Their views are not cited in this report.
Sagan, C., 1973, The Cosmic Connection – an Extraterrestrial Perspective
https://www.e-reading.life/bookreader.php/148581/Sagan_-_The_Cosmic_Connection___An_Extraterrestrial_Perspective.pdf
QUOTE Because of the danger of back-contamination of Earth, I firmly believe that manned landings on Mars should be postponed until the beginning of the next century, after a vigorous program of unmanned Martian exobiology and terrestrial epidemiology.
QUOTE I reach this conclusion reluctantly. I, myself, would love to be involved in the first manned expedition to Mars. But an exhaustive program of unmanned biological exploration of Mars is necessary first. The likelihood that such pathogens exist is probably small, but we cannot take even a small risk with a billion lives. Nevertheless, I believe that people will be treading the Martian surface near the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Lederberg, J., 1999b. Parasites face a perpetual dilemma. ASM News, 65(2).
https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/BBGNMX.pdf
QUOTE “Whether a microorganism from Mars exists and could attack us is more conjectural. If so, it might be a zoonosis to beat all others [infectious disease that jumps to humans]. On the one hand, how could microbes from Mars be pathogenic for hosts on Earth when so many subtle adaptations are needed for any new organisms to come into a host and cause disease? On the other hand, microorganisms make little besides proteins and carbohydrates, and the human or other mammalian immune systems typically respond to peptides or carbohydrates produced by invading pathogens. Thus, although the hypothetical parasite from Mars is not adapted to live in a host from Earth, our immune systems are not equipped to cope with totally alien parasites: a conceptual impasse.”
It’s the same for the NRC study which NASA do cite.
QUOTE “The potential hazards posed for Earth by viable organisms surviving in samples is significantly greater with a Mars sample return than if the same organisms were brought to Earth via impact-mediated ejection from Mars
… The committee found that the potential for large-scale negative effects on Earth’s inhabitants or environments by a returned martian life form appears to be low, but is not demonstrably zero”
https://www.nap.edu/read/12576/chapter/7#48
Though NASA’s EIS cite this study they don’t cite this section which refutes the conclusions of their sterilizing subcommittee.
I have mentioned this and many other issues in my comments on the draft EIS. I then sent a follow up email to the NASA planetary protection office.
Given how serious these issues are potentially, I’d expect at least a reply saying they found a mistake in what I said if there is something I got wrong. But no, I have had no response from them to any of this.
I am investigating what can be done to follow this up further.
I don’t want to say much more publicly at this stage – I am not sure what is possible yet and am still looking into possible courses of action, but if anyone is interested to talk to me about this please contact me at support (at) robertinventor.com
I found many mistakes like this, with cites that refute the sentences they are cited to, without the EIS commenting on this discrepancy and other cites that are omitted that overturn their findings.
NASA’s biggest omission in this EIS is that they don’t cite the European Space Foundation study in 2012 which reduced the 1 in a million threshold to 0.01 microns from 0.2 microns due the discovery of horizontal gene transfer to distantly related archaea a million times faster in sea water than previously thought Page 19 of
https://science.nasa.gov/science-red/s3fs-public/atoms/files/ESF_Mars_Sample_Return_backward_contamination_study.pdf
QUOTE Surprisingly, it is now estimated that GTA transduction rates are more than a million times higher than previously reported for viral transduction rates in marine environments. Clearly, GTAs are a major source of genetic diversity in marine bacteria.
The ESF also said a particle of 0.05 microns or larger shouldn’t be released under any circumstances because of the discovery that ultramicrobacteria remain viable after passing through 0.1 micron nanopores. Page 21
“the release of a particle larger than 0.05 μm in diameter is not acceptable in any circumstances”
From the ESF study itself the previous size limit review was in 1999 so NASA are relying on science from 23 years ago when it says a BSL-4 is sufficient to contain the samples. The ESF review itself said we need periodic review of their conclusions so a new size limit review is certainly needed a decade later before NASA should consider doing a proper scientifically valid EIS.
We don’t need to contain gene transfer agents or ultramicrobacteria in a BSL-4 but these requirements go well beyond any current air filter technology in recent air filter reviews like this one. Here bear in mind 100% containment is needed at all sizes from 0.05 microns upwards and at all sizes from 0.01 microns upwards we need to make sure the chance of a single particle released is less than 1 in a million for the lifetime of the facility.
https://www.mdpi.com/2079-6439/10/2/15/pdf?version=1644317375
As a result of not alerting the reader when the cites contradict its own conclusions and omitting other cites like the 2012 size limit update and the 2015 MEPAG review, NASA’s draft EIS doesn’t have the scientific credibility one expects of NASA. It also doesn’t have the credibility that is actually required of a NEPA EIS.
This also means that the public weren’t given the opportunity to comment on a scientifically valid EIS.
As to why and how that happened that is for NASA to investigate and I hope they can ensure that a mishap like this never happens again!
This can be made into a mission that is 100% safe for Earth with virtually no impact on the science by sterilizing the samples before they reach Earth using an ionizing radiation dose equivalent to 500 million years of surface conditions. This would reduce the amino acids 1000 fold with virtually no impact on the geological interest. As for astrobiological interest due to no in situ life detection, because Perseverance can’t drill to layers protected from surface ionizing radiation, and high levels of forward contamination, these samples are sadly of virtually no astrobiological interest.
The mission could be made far more interesting by sending STERILE containers on the ESF fetch rover to return bonus samples of dirt, dust and atmosphere without forward contamination.
These could be studied above geostationary orbit, in Mars simulation conditions with a centrifuge for artificial gravity remotely. NOT talking here about a human occupied space station. Humans go nowhere near it because of issues of contamination both ways (the HEPA filters won’t keep out ultramicrobacteria in the forward direction too).
Instead it is a single satellite, the equivalent of just one geostationary satellite but placed far above GEO. Humans study the dust, dirt and atmosphere just as they would on Mars using in situ instruments designed for end to end sample preparation to analysis – these instruments already exist such as LD chip almost sent on Exomars but descoped, SETG, astrobionibbler, the chiral labelled release and others.
I go into details in my comments on the EIS.
Mr. Walker’s informative comments and links here are a welcome read to those of us in the planetary protection community and should raise some eyebrows by those who consider a Direct-to-Earth-Mars Sample Return as low risk because of meteorite exchange between the Earth and Mars.
It is incredulous to me that there aren’t many microbiologists or those that study the devastating ecological effects from invasive species weighing in on the NASA/ESA Direct-to-Earth Mars Sample Campaign. Furthermore, if the EPA allows this mission to go through, they will share in whatever consequences would result if a containment breach of any kind occurs. Exploring worlds that have biospheres, whether they under miles of ice and rock or sequestered in salts under a few centimeters of Martian soil demands a cautious scientific approach on the surface of Mars itself with multiple missions designed not only to detect life but to also study its genetic makeup which could take many years to complete.Planetary protection should not be done on “the cheap”.
Barry E. DiGregorio – Director for the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return (www.icamsr.org)