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32  Can We Keep Mars Clean?
    The Washington Post, Sunday, February 19, 1967

     Diseases and pests have figured as eternal partners of
colonization and commerce.  The expected opening of interplanetary
traffic raises a parallel issue: the conservation of the solar
system against the possible hazards of cross-contamination.

     The free space between the planets has been a reliable shield
against the natural transport of living forms -- mainly by the sheer
vastness of these cosmic intervals, but also by the sterilizing
action of the sun's rays, especially in the ultraviolet zone which,
for us on the earth's surface, is filtered out by the ozone layer of
our atmosphere.

     Now we are aiming rockets at Mars, and planning landings -- and
eventual roundtrips.  Microbes being so ubiquitous on earth, these
missions are bound to break the quarantine unless we take the most
careful precautions.

     Like most conservationist precautions, these are expensive and
difficult; there will be constant pressure to relax them to the lowest
acceptable level.  However, the caution to avoid contamination has
been acknowledged as international policy in the recent treaty on
principles of space exploration.

     The treaty lays down no technical details.  It does have the
effect, however, of ensuring international scrutiny of the policies
adopted by each country, which should be some leverage in favor of
conservationist principles.

     The problem is how to assess the need for and the means to
achieve decontamination in the face of a near vacuum of insight into
either the physics of a planet like Mars or its eventual role in human
affairs.

     We cannot begin to dream of the ways in which Mars might be
colonized or cultivated or mined, or used as a platform away from
the earth and sun, or a quarantine station and planet of embarkation
for the rest of the cosmos.

     All we can be sure of is that what will happen must surpass, or
rather evade, our wildest dreams -- all history has followed that
pattern.  However, most discussions about the hazards of contaminating
Mars have focussed much too narrowly; merely on the confusion this
would raise for our first business there, the search for indigenous
life.

     Recent evidence of the aridity of Mars strongly colors thinking
about the contamination problem.  The planet may indeed be too dry
to support life -- or if life persists in scattered oases, to allow
it to spread freely over the surface.

     But our model of Mars now is very feeble, and might be overturned
by next year, and again after that.  Knowing our present ignorance,
how irresponsible it would be to seal this issue for time evermore by
any action we blunder into!  The danger is that a single spore from
earth could dominate the ecology of one oasis, and eventually of the
entire planet.

     Had we exhausted the reconnaissance of the planet from a safe
distance, we might then want to hasten the landing probes like those
now being discussed for Extended Mariner in 1971.  However, Mariner
IV gave us only our first close glimpse, and we might get another in
a Mariner rerun in 1969.  Present plans call for the first landing
efforts long before we can have acquired a deep understanding of the
problems of Martian topography by remote sensors, such as we have
been gaining of the moon with Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter missions.

     These early landers would, however, be instrumented capsules.
In principle, they might be subjected to rigorous heat-sterilization,
and we have some time to verify how well this works.  The main problem
is perhaps not an engineering breakdown but a political one: that in
the pressure of the moment of launch, a leak in the sterilization 
system might not be taken seriously enough to lead to scrubbing a
mission.  NASA has certainly found it very difficult to keep its
contractors, sometimes even its astronauts, from carrying unauthorized
objects aboard its spacecraft.

     For similar reasons, it is hard to see how any manned mission
could be made to comply with the injunction against harmful
contamination.  In his intestinal tract, man carries the dirtiest
abundance of microbes.

     Mission policy might hope to screen a planet from direct contact
with the spacesuited astronaut, but would a manned mission be
disallowed an emergency landing at the cost of a life?  Serious
discussion of manned visits to the planets is therefore predicated
on discounting the contamination risk to those celestial bodies.

     It also ignores the remote -- but still irrefutable --
possibility of a back-contamination of the earth from them.  To
justify such a responsibility calls for a far more detailed program
of planetary science than appears in any present day timetable.

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