You probably didn’t notice, but for the past 11 years, one person has been protecting the Earth from sci-fi Armageddon. Catharine Conley was hired by Nasa in 2006 to ensure that space journeys leaving and returning to Earth don’t bring back extraterrestrial bacteria, and with that, unknown consequences. “There are an increasing number of organisations becoming involved in space exploration, so the potential for inadvertent contamination is increasing,” she says.
As Nasa’s first and only female planetary protection officer, Catharine Conley is not your average scientist, although she may insist otherwise. “It’s mostly men who build space missions,” she says. “Plus, I’m not particularly tall.”
Nevertheless, since 1996, Conley has been working to protect the world from Martian invasion. "The guidelines for this protection were set out in 1967 in Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty," she says. And it’s Conley’s job to enforce them. But, after 21 years, she will be stepping down from her role in the coming months.
“We know from experience of moving organisms around on Earth that invasive species can have unexpected and unintended consequences,” she says. “Assuring Earth’s safety from extraterrestrial biohazards is the highest priority for planetary protection.”
Space travel seems to run in Conley’s blood. She is old enough to remember the first ever Moon landing, but only barely. Her father, a mathematician for Nasa in 1969, developed a theoretical solution to the special case of the “Three-Body Problem”. The successful calculation of this gravitational puzzle enabled the first Moon landing to proceed. Conley’s desire to work for Nasa has been a life-long ambition.
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With a background in life sciences and humanities, Conley graduated from Cornell University with a Phd in plant biology in 1994. She spent nine months writing up her work in a post-doctoral fellowship at the Scripps Research Institute, studying proteins in animal muscle. Then, in 1999, Conley was hired at Ames Research Center at Nasa to continue this work, focusing on the development of organisms in extreme desert environments. It was here that her talent was noticed.
Conley's lab developed a whole-animal culture system for space flights, meaning you could experiment on microbes in space. Tragically, the first flight experiment they ever conducted was onboard the Space Shuttle Columbia, which exploded in the Earth’s atmosphere at launch on February 1, 2003, killing all seven people on board.
“When we recovered some hardware we found that our experimental animals had survived the crash.” Conley received a call from the previous planetary protection officer, curious about her advice for managing potential contamination. A few years later, in 2006, she was informally appointed Nasa’s planetary protection officer. Her role would involve overseeing every space flight across Nasa, ensuring every vehicle entering space was correctly sterilised and checked for bacteria. The job change was formalised in 2009.
Ensuring that a spacecraft is clean enough to land on Mars starts with the design of the ship. The parts must be able to withstand treatments to kill microbes inside them and put up with regular cleaning during assembling. Then, once the ship is built, all space projects go through Conley, who developed a strategy for implementing compliance with the international regulations. Even most people who work on spaceflight missions are only involved in one at a time, but, as planetary protection officer, it was Conley’s job to oversee all planetary missions from start to finish. This means she’s worked on every space mission that Nasa has launched since 2006. “Not many people can say that,” she says.
“The point of planetary protection is to ensure we keep our options open in how we're exploring space today,” Conley continues. “Right now, all the people planning human missions to Mars implicitly or explicitly assume that there's nothing particularly hazardous to humans on Mars, other than the physics of the environment.”
And by ensuring that the amount of Earth contamination introduced to Mars is limited, future generations will have a better chance at understanding solutions for potential colonisation. “They might choose to settle on Mars so it’s very important to ensure the data collected to inform those future decisions is good. Historically, humans [on Earth] have allowed mistakes to be made, attempting to fix the resulting problems with limited success,” Conley explains.
When it comes to space exploration, the enormous difficulty and cost of reaching other planets means humanity has avoided making too many mistakes that could contaminate Mars. But, in the coming years, this could all change. “There’s a window of a few years, maybe a decade, during which a solid consensus needs to be developed that commercial space will also implement planetary protection according to the international guidelines,” she says.
“If this does not happen effectively, then there’s a good chance that whatever life we find on Mars will have come from Earth.” Conley remains hopeful for the future of life in space. "There are very many other solar systems, and the more we learn about them it becomes clear that the one we’re in is very average," she says. "It seems absurd to think this is the only one where things grow."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
