Planetary protection is aimed to prevent contamination of celestial bodies that would compromise the search for extraterrestrial life and to protect the Earth from extraterrestrial matter carried by spacecrafts returning from a mission. To ensure that scientific investment in space exploration is not compromised by cross-contamination, special care need to be taken by all actors and stakeholders. Current COSPAR’s planetary protection policy is mainly focused on requirements for Mars space missions. However, they are less developed for the Outer Solar System due to the lack of understanding of the environmental conditions and limited relevant microbial survivability studies.
With the increasing evidence of presence of liquid water in the Outer Solar System, the number of potential habitable environment increases, and as a consequence, the issue of contaminating other planets and moons is more important and relevant.v Therefore, updating the COSPAR planetary protection policy is timely and of the upmost importance.
In this context, the project planetary protection of Outer Solar System (PPOSS) funded by the European Commission’s H2020 Programme was kicked-off in March 2016. This project intended to provide an international platform and forum where various communities gathered and exchanged on the matter of planetary protection with a focus on Outer Solar System bodies. Through an intensive three year programme (2016-2018), the project nurtured and catalysed discussions to define strategic science and policy recommendations related to biological and organic contamination prevention in the frame of Outer Solar System bodies’ exploration. The PPOSS project, gathered seven European partner organisations, one international partner and one international observer to work together and consider how planetary protection policy had been developed so far and is being implemented. To this purpose, PPOSS considered and delineated the state of the art, identified lessons to be learnt and good practices in planetary Protection. Looking forward, PPOSS also identified scientific challenges and knowledge gaps as well as defined scientific requirements for Outer Solar System bodies planetary protection. PPOSS also involved interactions with the European industry and developed a set of European industry roadmaps and played an important role disseminating the relevance of planetary protection through a set of international trainings. The main objectives of the PPOSS project were:
1) Describe the state of the art and good practice for implementing planetary protection requirements, and identify good practices and lessons to be learnt.
2) Identify scientific challenges, scientific requirements and knowledge gaps related to planetary protection of outer solar systems bodies, including small solar system bodies.
3) Develop an European engineering roadmap for the industry sector.
4) Review of the international outer solar system planetary protection regulation structure and categorisation, suggest improvements.
5) Facilitate the dissemination of knowledge related to planetary protection.
