NASA is Updating its Guidelines on How to Prevent Contamination of the Solar System

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

NASA is updating its guidelines on how to prevent contamination of the Solar System:

After years of debate, NASA plans to update its guidelines for how much biological contamination of other worlds will be allowed while the agency explores the Solar System.

[...] For decades, NASA has followed fairly strict rules about how much biological contamination is considered acceptable whenever the agency sends probes - or people - to other planets. It's a concept known as planetary protection, and it has a legal basis in a treaty signed more than 50 years ago. Called the Outer Space Treaty, it challenges nations to explore other worlds "so as to avoid their harmful contamination" and to not bring back any alien microbes from other worlds that could cause harm to Earth.

A big goal of planetary protection has been to keep us from tracking microbes all over the Solar System. That way, if we were to come across some kind of life form on another world, we would know with certainty that it actually came from that world and that we didn't put it there on accident. Planetary protection is also focused on keeping humans safe, too. If a country does find life, we want to make sure it's not going to wipe us out if they bring it back to our planet.

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