Environment & Energy

Given the impacts of pollution on Earth, anthropogenically introduced chemicals and materials associated with robotic or crewed exploration missions could also cause “harmful contamination” to a celestial body, either to undiscovered life (if it exists) or to poorly understood abiotic processes.
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There is also increasing concern within the Planetary Protection community regarding organic chemical contamination which could lead to false positive biological signature identification or otherwise interfere with studies of the chemical evolution of the solar system. Some modeling studies have been conducted to explore the very near-field contamination potential of organics that could be emitted from Martian rover missions in the context of false positive signatures. Interestingly, the need for large-scale chemical transport modeling has been highlighted for the Moon. There are concerns that volatile chemicals introduced by human lunar exploration missions could be transported via volatilization-deposition cycles to regions of high scientific interest, such as permanently shadowed regions. This could disrupt investigations into the chemical evolution of the solar system.