NASA’s ‘planetary protection officer’ guards life on Mars

Keeping both planets safe is job behind cool title.

There’s a vacancy atNASA, and it may have one of the greatest job titles ever conceived: planetary protection officer.

It pays well, between $ 124,000 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 tomanage anyone. Andyour 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 program, signing an executive order last month resurrecting the National Space Council, on hiatus since the 1990s, and discussing the prospect of sending people to Mars. His proposed budget for NASA seeks a slight funding reduction overall, though he said he wants to realign spending to focus on “deep space exploration rather than Earth-centric research.”

So howdoes 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 that 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. The earliest missions, part of NASA’s Viking program, included meticulous steps to not sully the Martian landscape, she said.

“The landers,” Conley explained, “were packaged and put inside a bioshield and baked in an oven to kill all organisms— a ‘full-system sterilization,’ we call it... . We needed to protect the life-detection instruments and protect the Mars environmentin case it turnedout to be habitable to Earth life.”

Today, rovers operate where it’s believed water once existed, gathering imagery, analyzing the environment and beaming that data back to Earth. And as scientists’ understanding of the Red Planet evolves, so do the questions facing thoseworking to send people there in the coming decades.

“Will the humans be alive by the timetheyget toMars?” Conley askedin 2014. “If they die on Mars, are they then contaminating the surface?” That could interfere with future research, she said.

Environmental and atmospheric samples may hold important answers, “ostensibly to seek out signs of aliens,” as Business Insider reported. But sending anything fromMars back to labs here on Earth presents risk. The planetary protection officer will be instrumental in creating the tools and rules to reduce it.

“The phrase thatwe use,” Conley told Business Insider, “is ‘break the chain of contact with Mars.’”

She has not said whether she intends to reapply for the job.

The planetary protection officer position would mostly try to ensure that neither Mars nor Earth impacts each other.