Aldrin, left, lunar module pilot, Neil Armstrong, centre, flight commander, and Lt. The story of NASA's 1969 plan to stop potential lunar microorganisms from contaminating the Earth is a strange tale of a high stakes risk-benefit calculation.īut while the quarantine plan of 1969 was plagued with problems, it does provide scientists with lessons to learn from should they discover actual microorganisms on distant planets, especially as NASA looks to conduct future missions to Mars and into deep space.Īpollo 11 astronauts Col. "If it had, federal officials privately agreed, the Apollo missions would release it into Earth's biosphere." "As NASA prepared to land its astronauts on the moon, there was no way for scientists to know whether microbial life had evolved on or beneath the lunar surface," Degroot wrote. NASA officials knew there was a distant possibility that lunar microbes could pose a threat to the Earth if they existed - and according to Degroot's archival work, they knew that they couldn't stop them from escaping. The paper compiles the complicated, convoluted story of NASA and federal agencies trying to come up with a plan to avoid backward contamination of Earth from the moon, all while juggling political considerations and the risk to the human astronauts at the centre of the mission. "Had Apollo 11 returned microorganisms from the moon, they would likely have escaped," Dagomar Degroot, an environmental historian at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., wrote in a new paper published this month in the peer-reviewed history journal Isis. The key word here is "luckily," because a new analysis of NASA's quarantine protocols for Apollo 11 shows the mission's plan would not have been able to contain the dangerous lunar microorganisms that some scientists feared could break loose. Download our app to get breaking news alerts delivered right to you.Tailor the news you receive straight to your inbox by signing up for our newsletters.Luckily, the moon didn't have any space diseases, mysterious lunar pathogens or any unknown biological material that astronauts could have taken back to Earth with them. Fifty-four years ago, NASA launched Apollo 11, the mission that would bring the first human beings to the surface of the moon.īut as scientists prepared, a new fear sprung up: what if the mission brought lunar microbes back to Earth, which could unleash a pandemic of unknown proportions?
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