History will note that the existence of liquid water on Mars was discovered by a 20-year-old student at the University of Arizona who played in a metal band and worked in a planetary science laboratory. Once, comparing satellite photographs of the same crater on Mars, taken at different times, he drew attention to dark stripes that became longer in summer and shorter in winter. They seemed to run down the slopes of the crater like liquid.
It took NASA several years to gather additional information after the student reported his findings, but in September 2015 the agency called a major press conference. It communicated what the student assumed immediately after he made his discovery - there is water in this crater.
In the 1970s, NASA scientists informed everyone that the Red Planet was a dry, desolate, lifeless place. Oh. Now a new generation of NASA scientists, standing on the dais in Washington, dreamed openly about the importance of the new discovery to the possibility of finding life on Mars. “Wherever you look on Earth, there is liquid water,” said Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA. "We meet life." On Mars, water is not limited by the slope of one crater. Realizing exactly what to look for, scientists have found many of the same dark streaks in other places. NASA's Curiosity rover is within reach of these dark streaks. “We can visit this place,” Green said. This statement was published by the media around the world. It also led to a series of changes within the agency.
About a month after this press conference, NASA administrator Cassie Conley sat in her office in front of a computer screen, staring at a crudely made website called UFO Sightings Daily. Someone from the participants in the astrobiological conference told her that there was a very interesting photograph published there.
The site was created by an amateur researcher in a style quite common to fans of UFO conspiracy theory. There were published photographs in which, allegedly, were captured small female aliens, tiny star cruisers and extraterrestrial squirrels. Conley was looking for a photo that the rover actually took, and the site's creator posted it with accompanying text. A UFO fan noted some rocks in this photograph, calling them evidence of intelligent life on Mars. According to him, these piles of stones represent "a building with a passage." Complete nonsense. But there was also a strip in the photo extending from a cleft between two rocks. The author of the site wrote that it is water. And it really felt like water.
The nearest such strips, known to NASA at the time, were located more than three kilometers from the rover, on the steep slopes of Mount Sharpe. But this strip was located a few meters from the device. The photo showed the tracks from his wheels in the immediate vicinity of her. Conley picked up the phone.
She needed to speak urgently with the Curiosity team.
Now are the amazing times for everyone who dreams of flying to Mars. Over the next five years, the world's space agencies intend to send five missions to the Red Planet, which will double the number of functioning robots and landing modules on the Martian surface. At the end of April, SpaceX announced its intention to send the Red Dragon capsule to Mars, which the company plans to use for a manned flight to Mars in the future, already in 2018. Between Elon Musk's star power and Andy Weir's film adaptation of The Martian, space has returned to American pop culture. The idea of the possibility of colonizing Mars again became respected, as if it was not nearly as incredible as the favorable attitude towards Marxism.
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However, there is one problem. Mars may already be habitable. Martians can live on it, albeit very small. And that worries Cassie Conley.
Conley's job at NASA is to keep us from screwing up big when we first meet aliens, however tiny they are. Her official position is called the United States Planetary Security Officer. Her duties are to monitor the coming and going of the smallest earthlings, that is, microorganisms. It turns out that they are very dexterous to ride as hares on spaceships. NASA's growing and increasingly sophisticated robot fleet is plowing space and sending amazing finds to Earth, including water on Mars, geysers on Enceladus, the moon of Saturn, and seething seas beneath Europa's icy surface. Conley, meanwhile, spends 14 hours a day trying to prevent these robots from infecting heavenly bodies with earthly microbes. The more likely it is to be able to sustain life at the destination,the stricter it becomes.
Conley's small department, NASA's Planetary Defense Office (motto: All Planets, All Seasons), dates back to the Cold War, when the USSR and the US signed an agreement to prevent space pollution. One of the reasons for the existence of this department is purely scientific. If extraterrestrial life exists, then scientists will want to see how it came into existence and evolved, that is, look at what planetary scientist Chris McKay calls "the second birth." To avoid misleading conclusions, humans must try not to pollute space with their bacteria.
Another, less formal reason for the department's existence today is environmental. You might even call it anti-colonial. In essence, Conley's department is trying to prevent Earthlings from doing to the Martians what the Europeans did to the North American natives with smallpox. Since the history of Mars has not had such a turbulent life as in the history of the Earth, bacteria that got there as stowaways will find plenty of raw materials to devour it. If, for example, they get into the water, they find a niche to survive, and begin to reproduce. “The whole planet will be a meal for them. They will eat Mars,”she says. Conley says that you should at least find out if life exists on Mars before bringing in aliens who will destroy it.
The third reason for the Conley department may seem apocalyptic. In the 1960s, at the dawn of the space age, the public imagination was very worried about the possibility of interplanetary contamination. In 1969, Michael Crichton published the Andromeda Strain novel, based on the death of a city in Arizona as a result of the introduction of alien bacteria that came to Earth from a satellite. Two months later, the triumphant return of the Apollo 11 crew that landed on the Moon took place. The astronauts were picked up from their landing site in the ocean and transported to a hermetically sealed NASA facility in Houston. There they were put in an isolation cell, poked, injected, washed with bleach for two weeks. Only after that they were given a triumphant reception. There is a priceless photograph that capturesHow President Richard Nixon speaks to astronauts on a microphone, while they are in a sealed Airstream trailer. In those days, planetary protection was a priority for us and meant protecting our planet from a potentially dangerous alien life form.
Apollo 11 mission
These fears were gradually dispelled when it turned out that there was no life on the moon, and the Viking rovers in the 1970s showed that Mars is a desert planet. But those conclusions turned out to be wrong, so now who knows?
In short, after visiting the UFO Sightings Daily website, Conley did not call the Curiosity rover team to ask them to point the rover towards the water. On the contrary, she asked them to keep the apparatus away from water.
Conley is a very small woman, thin, her height is barely 155 centimeters. When we met at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in suburban Maryland, she was lost inside her heavy coat. But she seems to be a natural born planetary protection officer. Her father was a mathematician and worked for NASA. Her mother was a biologist and studied the genetics of fruit flies. The pet, the hamster, was named J. B. S. Haldane, in honor of 20th century British geneticist John Byrd Sanders Haldane. His views on the origin of life inspired the idea of planetary protection.
Conley started working at NASA as a research biologist. She specialized in experiments with nematodes or roundworms, tiny organisms. They were experimental animals for her. In January 2003, she sent one of her experiments aboard the space shuttle Columbia. The experiment was to show how a prolonged stay in zero gravity would affect the development of muscles and the metabolism of nematodes. People will be exposed to the same effect of weightlessness during a flight to Mars.
But in February 2003, the space shuttle Columbia fell apart at an altitude of 70 kilometers at a speed 22 times the speed of sound. Seven cosmonauts were killed.
For Conley, another crash followed. Two and a half months later, she was driving along the road to California in a car with two friends. Another car collided with them. As a result of the accident, one of her friends died, and the other became disabled. Conley recovered from three days of unconsciousness. She had five broken vertebrae, she was on a morphine drip. The nurse brought her a phone. The call was from The New York Times. The reporter said, "Your worms survived the disaster."
The wreckage of the space shuttle was scattered hundreds of miles across Texas and Louisiana. The workers spent a lot of time putting them together and they found five small aluminum containers. Conley's worms were inside, and most of them were alive, if only hibernated from being without food.
These two disasters showed Conley how viable the simplest organisms can be. Life seems fragile to people, because people can exist only under certain conditions. Without water, food and air, we die. Heat and cold are killing us. When our ship explodes at an altitude of 70 kilometers or as a result of a collision of our cars, we are killed. Keeping a small number of people alive while flying into space is extremely difficult and costly. Complex life forms are rare and fragile. Most life forms are simple, widespread, and incredibly tenacious.
Eliminating any microbes that might accidentally end up on a spaceship is a very difficult and costly task. But that was what became Conley's primary focus when she took over the Office of Planetary Defense in 2006. Day after day, she calculates what is the probability that a particular device will meet an alien life form (a very low probability on a space body deprived of water, but higher in the case of a device that approached Europe) and thinking over a set of measures for digestion, sterilization and scraping with the aim of destruction of aggressive terrestrial organisms. Whenever scientists make a new discovery about Martian conditions or about extremophilic organisms on Earth, Conley amends numerous planetary defense procedures.
Sunset on Mars
Since it is impossible to destroy absolutely all microorganisms on the rover, even the most stringent cleaning procedures determine only probabilities and ratios. The biggest thing Conley can do is to ensure there is no more than one microbe per 0.03 square meter of spacecraft surface. This standard was set for the Viking mission in 1976. Such work requires a scientist's willingness to believe in the odd possibility and statistical discipline of a Las Vegas critic.
To find out how all microorganisms are destroyed, I went to the Goddard Space Flight Center. There I was dressed from head to toe in a special suit. I found myself in a snow-white room, shining with cleanliness. Just to enter the room, I was wrapped in many layers of clothing, including gloves, shoes, and hoods, designed to prevent contact with contaminated surfaces.
Inside, one guy, dressed in his own suit, spends several hours a day assembling a mass spectrometer that will fly to the Red Planet on the European Space Agency's ExoMars rover in 2020. A special apparatus constantly blows air and microparticles from its working surface. Above, on the ceiling, is a device that emits ultraviolet light to kill germs. Every day, a technician cleans the room with a mixture of isopropyl alcohol and diluted hydrogen peroxide (to kill germs that have developed resistance to one or the other). Then NASA microbiologist Erin Lalime takes a sample of the microculture to determine the level of contamination. The assembled mass spectrometer will be cooked for 60 hours at 110 degrees. After that, he will fly into space. But some microorganisms will still survive.
To help me understand how this is possible, Lelime describes how bundles of DNA inside bacterial spores, when exposed to extreme conditions, curl up into a ball surrounded by a dense shell of protein. At this point, the spore is almost completely devoid of energy and water. “In a metabolic sense, she's almost dead,” Lelime said. Sleeping spores can come to life after thousands of years in airless space. For them, the cruel, airless space - the phrase Conley often says - is just a Sunday stroll.
Conley's work is pretty lonely in nature. She is a microbiologist at an agency that employs mainly physicists and engineers. She is a woman in a men's organization and a sheriff (someone even made a joke badge for her), a head shorter than all her colleagues. At one time, her work made her unpopular. For most engineers, geologists and Mars enthusiasts, the entire planetary defense project is a system of overly expensive precautions in the extremely unlikely event (listen to some critics, Conley is to NASA what the smarmy EPA Walter Peck is to ghost hunters).
But that doesn't stop Conley. According to her, history is full of examples where human carelessness led to dire environmental consequences, and not because of malicious actions, but as a result of limited thinking and inability to imagine the obscure unknown. “We didn’t think that areas of Central America would be deserted for hundreds of years by malaria. We didn’t think the southern part of the United States would be covered with kudzu (kudzu lobules, a genus of herbs, the US government encouraged its cultivation in the 1950s, but today kudzu is considered a weed - approx. Trans.). I never thought about whether nematodes could survive a spaceship crash. Then that disaster happened,”Conley said.
The Curiosity rover heads for Mount Sharpe
The Curiosity rover shouldn't have been at the top of Conley's list of reasons for concern. NASA specifically directed the rover into Gale Crater, one of the least likely places for life to exist, as the mission's primary mission was geological exploration. Conley helped to choose the landing site herself. For this reason, the rover underwent a relaxed cleaning procedure from microorganisms. In his case, the standard allowed leaving 300 organisms per square meter.
Now, driving in the area of probable moisture accumulation in Gale Crater, Curiosity may carry tens of thousands of persistent earth microbes that survived the launch and many months of flight in the harsh airless space. They only need the right combination of water, heat and food to return to life and begin to reproduce.
In a meeting after the call, the rover's lead scientist Ashwin Vasavada questioned the newly discovered dark streaks in the UFO Sightings Daily image as water. His research suggested that sometimes conditions in Gale Crater lead to the formation of very salty water on the surface. But the stripes found in the photo were most likely microscopic avalanches. Conley, however, was not happy with the "most likely" probability. Vasavada agreed. He later clarified that we cannot be sure that we fully understand the environmental conditions in that place. They agreed that the rover team will closely examine all new photographs in search of traces of water, and only then decide on further progress.
According to Vasavada, he got off lightly yet. “The team for the next mission already has serious problems with the Department of Planetary Defense,” he said.
He was referring to the Mars 2020 mission to deliver another robotic rover to the Red Planet. In fact, this device was assembled, including from parts left after the assembly of Curiosity. This apparatus is designed to search for traces of ancient microbiological life on Mars. Moreover, he will try to take soil samples that can be delivered to Earth by another spacecraft. The project was carried out by the Jet Propulsion Research Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Project staff declined to comment on me, but other sources said they were in a desperate dispute with the planetary defense department about the landing site and the procedure for sterilizing the rover before it was sent to Mars. Since a significant part of the equipment was created before the discovery of water, it will not withstand the rigorous processing procedure,which Conley insists on. As the 2020 mission launch window quickly approaches, the project is falling behind the sterilization approval schedule.
"There's a massive battle going on at NASA," Weir, the author of The Martian, who had met some of the space agency's staff, told me. According to him, “The planetary protection procedure has become a heavy burden for the development of these probes. It significantly complicated the work in all aspects."
In 2013, two astrobiologists published a paper in Nature Geoscience arguing that all planetary defenses can be waived when it comes to Mars. "If terrestrial microorganisms are able to live on Mars, then they already live there," they wrote, noting that meteorites must have delivered terrestrial microbes to the Red Planet long ago. And if microorganisms from Earth are unable to survive on Mars, then there is nothing to worry about.
Conley has an answer to this consideration. Even if Martian organisms have a common origin with terrestrial ones, several thousand years of separate evolution probably made them completely alien to us. But the best argument in favor of planetary protection is a reminder of how much our understanding of Mars has changed over the years. Curiosity took it almost to the point of detecting liquid water because we didn't know what we didn't know. Conley also quotes Haldane: “The universe is not only much stranger than we think. She's weirder than we might think."
Sometimes critics of planetary defense call this department a farce because we all know how it will end. When people arrive on Mars with coughs, runny nose and intestinal flora, all these sterilization procedures will go to the trash can. Conley understands this well. She knows that one day, perhaps in the middle of the century, men and women will step on the surface of Mars. For her, this means that there is little time left for an attempt to study and the likely discovery of life forms, in fact, alien to us, before people fly to the Red Planet.
Kevin Carey works for New America, a Washington think tank.