Vacancy at Nasa to protect Earth at R1.6m a year

THERE’S a vacancy at Nasa, and it may have one of the greatest job titles ever conceived: planetary protection officer.

It pays well, between $124 000 (R1.6m) and $187 000 annually. You get to work with really smart people as part of the three- to five-year appointment but don’t have to manage anyone. And your work could stave off an alien invasion of Earth or, more important, protect other planets from us.

President Donald Trump has expressed bullish enthusiasm for America’s space programme, signing an executive order last month resurrecting the National Space Council, on hiatus since the 1990s, and gleefully discussing the prospect of sending people to Mars. So how does the one-person Planetary Protection Office fit in with Nasa’s broader objectives?

The job announcement is rather dense. But Catharine Conley, the Nasa scientist who has been in this role for three years, has spoken candidly about its scope and responsibilities, telling Scientific American in 2014 that her focus is to ensure the agency’s activity complies with a 50-year-old international treaty that set standards for preventing biological contamination outside of Earth and safeguarding the planet’s biosphere from any alien life.

To that end, the magazine asked Conley a lot about Mars, where Nasa has deployed exploratory spacecraft and robots since the mid-1970s to search for clues about the existence of water, prospects for habitability and any existence of life.

Today, rovers operate where it’s believed water once existed, gathering imagery, analysing the environment and beaming that data back to Earth.

And as scientists’ understanding of the Red Planet evolves, so do the questions facing those working to send people there in the coming decades. – Washington Post