Preserving the Planets -- Ours and Others: Planetary Protection in Space Exploration

As the search for extraterrestrial life steps up, planetary protection is becoming more and more important. Toward compliance with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, national and international planetary protection policy calls for preventing contamination of extraterrestrial environments with terrestrial biology and contamination of the terrestrial environment with extraterrestrial biology, should it be found. This talk will address planetary protection requirements for MSL other upcoming life-search missions. A special focus of this talk will be ethical considerations relating to planetary exploration. While policy calls for pristine extraterrestrial environments to be preserved for scientific research, should other ethical and philosophical considerations be given equal weight? Is human exploration compatible with planetary protection?