Planetary protection technologies for planetary science instruments, spacecraft, and missions: Report of the NASA Planetary Protection Technology Definition Team (PPTDT)

Abstract

Planetary bodies like Mars, Europa, and Enceladus pose the question, “How to study them without contaminating them and destroying future prospects to detect life, if it is there?” The natural trade-off, of course, is that the cleaner your spacecraft, the more you can explore such a body without risk of contaminating it. As chartered by NASA Headquarters, the Planetary Protection Technology Definition Team (PPTDT) was asked to provide a report covering six different areas related to the engineering and technology challenges of implementing planetary protection requirements on solar system exploration missions:•Assessment of technical and engineering challenges to applying available microbial-reduction methods, including recontamination prevention, to spacecraft hardware and instruments, to meet current NASA requirements on preventing the forward contamination of potentially habitable worlds by future spacecraft missions (orbiters, atmospheric missions, landers, penetrators, and drills);•Identification of spacecraft and instrument materials known to be compatible with existing planetary protection protocols;•Planetary protection protocols/processes available or which appear promising, and areas ripe for technological development;•The technical and engineering challenges in ensuring that spacecraft hardware and instruments can meet organic cleanliness requirements needed to ensure high confidence in differentiating Earth contamination from extraterrestrial signals to avoid false negative as well as false positive results;•Approaches for mitigating the identified challenges that would allow instruments to be flown successfully at the required levels of cleanliness and microbial reduction, beginning with identification of commonly used materials and spacecraft hardware that are compatible (or particularly vulnerable) to planetary protection protocols; and•Engineering, technology, and scientific research and development that could be funded by NASA to provide future capabilities to field scientific instruments and spacecraft on missions that require either subsystem or system-level microbial reduction and recontamination prevention.