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To Find Alien Life, We Might Have to Kill It
Missions to explore other worlds, like Mars or Saturn’s moon Titan, could disrupt or destroy extraterrestrial life in the process of seeking it.
For instance, many space missions are equipped with a mass spectrometer, a precision instrument that vaporizes extraterrestrial samples in order to reveal detailed information about its constituent chemical parts—including, potentially, aliens. Chelsea Haramia, an associate professor of philosophy at Spring Hill College in Alabama and a senior research fellow at the University of Bonn in Germany, says that the trade-offs of mass spectrometers and other instruments should be thoroughly hashed out in advance of missions. Grinspoon adds that NASA’s planetary protection office is involved in the design and approval of every mission launched to potentially habitable environments, and that spacecraft, including Mars rovers, go through a thorough sterilization process to avoid forward contamination of alien worlds with earthly microbes.
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