NASA SP-2011-4234. This book presents the history of planetary protection by tracing the responses to the concerns on NASAs missions to the Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and many smaller bodies of our solar system. The book relates the extensive efforts put forth by NASA to plan operations and prepare space vehicles that return exemplary science without contaminating the biospheres of other worlds or our own. To protect irreplaceable environments, NASA has committed to conducting space exploration in a manner that is protective of the bodies visited, as well as of our own planet.

Full color reprint of NASA History Office Study of 2007. Illustrated throughout.

Full color reprint of NASA History Office Study of 2007. Illustrated throughout.

Each time a space vehicle visits another world it runs the risk of forever changing that extraterrestrial environment. We are surrounded on Earth by a melange of different microorganisms, and if some of these hitchhike onboard a space mission, they could contaminate and start colonies on a different planet. Such an occurrence would irrevocably alter the nature of that world, compromise all future scientific exploration of the body, and possibly damage any extant life on it. And by inadvertently carrying exotic organisms back to Earth on our spacecraft, we risk the release of biohazardous...