When Biospheres Collide: A History of NASA’s Planetary Protection Programs

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 mélange 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 materials into our own ecosystem.

This book presents the history of planetary protection by tracing the responses to the above concerns on NASA's missions to the Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and many smaller bodies of our solar system.