Sentences with phrase «new planetary protection»

Today, at a meeting in Washington, D.C., of NASA's planetary science advisory committee, the agency's new planetary protection officer raised the possibility of opening up a few of the planet's most promising regions to more aggressive exploration.

Whether NASA's policy might change won't be clear until a new planetary protection chief is installed, and after the National Academies panel and special regions workshop have weighed in.

Not exact matches

So argue two Mars scientists behind a controversial new push to relax planetary protection rules — a set of sterilisation procedures that Mars - bound spacecraft must undergo to avoid contaminating the planet with terrestrial microbes.

«No government in the world today has explicitly assigned the responsibility for planetary protection to any of its agencies,» ASE member Rusty Schweickart, who flew on the Apollo 9 mission in 1969, said Friday during a panel discussion at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

«When we landed the Huygens probe on Titan, we had no idea what we'd find on the surface, so it was really the discoveries of Huygens and Cassini that led to these new [planetary protection] requirements,» says Spilker.