Keep It Clean Says NASA

The Aerospace Corporation has landed a follow-on effort with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to continue researching the effectiveness of spacecraft cleaning methods used by NASA in missions to planets and moons that could harbor life.

A second $50,000 task came to Aerospace as a result of successful research in the same area that was completed for JPL in October 2000.

“Sterilization of spacecraft is very important for NASA missions to planets and moons that could potentially harbor life,” explained Dr. Carl Palko, a project engineer involved in the research.

“Outbound sterilization and cleaning is important to prevent both the accidental contamination or infection of alien worlds with terrestrial organisms and the accidental contamination of extraterrestrial soil or ice samples being returned to Earth with terrestrial organisms that could be mistaken as evidence for alien life,” Palko said.

The original effort focused on developing technologies to achieve sterilization through a cleaning process in which all organisms were removed. The work involved three areas: characterization of spacecraft materials, characterization of spacecraft cleaning methods, and experimental investigations into contaminated surfaces.

Hardy Spores

Palko said that one question JPL had was whether terrestrial bacteria might form igloo-like structures on aluminum surfaces when the surfaces dried. Many bacteria, he said, form spores that enable them to survive millions of years in poor conditions, such as extreme dryness or extreme cold.

“If the igloo-like structures on the inoculated aluminum really contain spores, it could seriously affect efforts to clean spacecraft to a level of sterility. The preliminary results of Aerospace and JPL experiments indicate that the domes may indeed contain spores, but further investigation is needed,” he said.

The follow-on effort will continue research in this area and will combine the three task areas into a single investigation to measure the effectiveness of the cleaning method on selected spacecraft materials.