Microbial Encounters in NASA’s Search for Life in Outer Space

• In Event: Science, Technology and Society in Outer Space - II

Abstract

At NASA, the office of Planetary Protection (PP) holds an ambivalent position. While other NASA departments often consider PP the police of a particular vision of space exploration, PP takes seriously their role as guardians of life. Attending to microbial life, PP strives to ensure that Earth microbes do not travel into space, potentially contaminating Mars or Europa surfaces and thus making impossible the practice of objective or “good” science. PP is also responsible for safeguarding Earth life during sample return missions and remains vigilant of the pathogenetic risks of Martian samples. As PP is transitioning into a new position within NASA, many of their methods are being scrutinized and are under consideration for innovation. Thinking with Hayles’ (1990, 1999) dynamic chaos theory and Haraway’s (1991) situated positionality, my paper will investigate scientists' creative interactions with contamination. I explore how centering contamination can elucidate alternative origins of biological life that emerge from life's unexpected and intimate collaborations. While participating in PP meetings and conferences over the last year, I witnessed the microbe’s astonishing ability to confound the efforts of sterilization techniques; the uneasy compromise that PP scientists have with these microbial presences hints at an unexpected imagining – what can attending to microbial life’s contagious capacity reveal about the liveliness of matter across the solar system? Drawing on participant observations, my paper will investigate the capricious ability of contamination to bring together microbes, swabs, rovers, and humans in ways that unmoor the characteristic relations between life.

Author

• Dana Burton, George Washington University