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DON’T BUG ME: Rummel’s
team scrubbed both Mars rovers for microbes.
Breton Littlehales |
John Rummel may own the
most unusual business card in the nation’s capital.
John D. Rummel, Ph.D.
Planetary Protection Officer
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
He takes this job seriously, but Rummel admits that
explaining it often prompts a grin. Who else can mingle
at a Georgetown cocktail party and throw around a line
like, “I’m in charge of protecting Earth
from alien life-forms”?
Rummel, PhD ’85, has spent more than a decade
on and off running NASA’s $2 million-a-year Planetary
Protection Program. His twin assignments: to make certain
that NASA space vehicles don’t unintentionally
infect other planets with Earth bacteria and to prevent
contaminating our own planet with microbes in rock or
soil samples we might collect on a space mission.
Both manager and scientist, Rummel directs more than
100 contract engineers, biologists and other technicians.
He spends much of his time away from his Washington
office, supervising sterilization procedures of outgoing
spacecraft and analyzing infection risks associated
with NASA missions, sometimes influencing the mission
itself.
Last September, acting on Rummel’s advice, NASA
crashed its dying Galileo space probe into
Jupiter instead of on Europa, one of the planet’s
moons and itself an inviting research target. Rummel
and his aides spent hundreds of hours analyzing magnetometer
readings, photographs and other data transmitted by
Galileo that together suggested the presence
of a large, deep ocean beneath the surface of Europa.
They concluded that the water might provide a habitat
for microbes aboard Galileo and “strongly
recommended the crash into Jupiter.”
Rummel describes that decision as an effort to avoid
“forward contamination.” It was a similar
fear that led his team to vigorously sanitize the two
Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity,
in preparation for their current missions. In the weeks
leading up to the liftoffs last summer, Rummel and his
technicians gathered at the Space Launch Complex in
Cape Canaveral, Fla., to sterilize every piece of the
Martian probes. All parts were assayed with biochemical
agents—including one derived from the blood of
horseshoe crabs—to hunt for spore-forming bacteria.
Then they were pressure-sprayed with isopropyl alcohol,
“baked” in special ovens and tested again.
This procedure was repeated day after day until the
microbe count was so low the bacteria would be unable
to thrive. The sterilized parts were then placed in
specially engineered germ-proof metal shrouds. Just
before final assembly, they were assayed again to check
for bacteria.
As launch time neared, Rummel was often on-site 12
hours a day as his team scrubbed the spacecraft clean.
“With a Mars rover, that’s especially important,
because it’s possible that some areas of the planet,
such as the polar ice caps, could sustain bacterial
life from Earth under the right conditions,” he
says. “We don’t want to land on Mars in
a few years and find the place swarming with our own
life-forms.”
Rummel defends his program against naysayers who claim
the notion of infecting other planets is far-fetched.
“We only started learning in the 1970s that Earth
bacteria can thrive in hydrothermal springs at over
200 degrees Fahrenheit and in other extremely hostile
environments. There’s no doubt Mars possesses
the kind of environmental niche that would allow some
forms of Earth microbes to survive.”
To guard against a “backward contamination”—the
possibility of introducing a deadly bug from another
planet—Rummel scrutinizes future space-exploration
projects with microbial safety in mind. “Right
now, NASA is planning for a Mars landing that will collect
samples and bring them home, sometime in the middle
of the next decade. Long before they get here, we’ll
have to build and test a [spaceship-quarantine] facility
that will give us maximum assay and sterilization control
over any microbial life-forms that might come back with
them. Gaining that kind of environmental control at
the microscopic level is enormously challenging, so
we’re going to be tested fully in the years ahead.”
In fact, he may be a few eons too late. “I think
the most likely scenario for contamination of our own
planet probably took place 3 or 4 billion years ago,
when ‘large-impact events’ were much more
frequent,” Rummel adds. “I think it’s
quite possible that our planet could have been contaminated
by meteorites knocked from the surface of Mars.”
Rummel says he became fascinated by the complexities
of “off-world biology” while studying Anolis
lizard ecology at Stanford. He served six years as a
Navy flight officer before joining NASA in the early
’90s, and that experience combined with his biology
expertise soon landed him the planetary protection responsibility.
Longtime colleague and former NASA Director of Solar
System Exploration Colleen Hartman says Rummel is ideally
suited to the job. “He’s a remarkably dedicated
and accomplished scientist, and he has a terrific sense
of humor.”
That sense of humor comes in handy when your job is
the stuff of science fiction, and Rummel plays along
with pop culture references to alien bad guys. He sometimes
dons a pair of jet-black Ray-Ban sunglasses—the
style worn by actor Tommy Lee Jones for the Men
in Black movies. He laughs at the suggestion that
he might one day prevent a real-life invasion of the
body snatchers.
“Fortunately, NASA isn’t responsible for
the kind of situation that took place in The Blob,”
he says, recalling the 1958 film in which Steve McQueen
and friends thwart an alien organism with an appetite
for teenagers. “I don’t think it’s
very likely that such life-forms could reach Earth via
a meteorite. And if it did happen, I don’t
think I’d be much help. If Steve McQueen couldn’t
get the job done, what chance would I have?
“Besides, if an alien like E.T. ever showed up
on Earth, NASA would probably refer it to Immigration
and Naturalization.”
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