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Loading contentThe discipline of preventing contamination — protecting other worlds from Earth microbes carried by spacecraft (forward contamination), and protecting Earth from any material returned from them (backward contamination), so the search for life is not fooled and no harm is done.
Preventing biological cross-contamination.
The risk of bringing potentially hazardous material back to Earth in a returned sample. Sample-return missions are designed to contain their cargo as strictly as the most dangerous pathogens, so nothing escapes before it is shown to be safe.
The risk of carrying Earth microbes to another world on a spacecraft, which could harm any native biosphere or, worse, be mistaken for alien life. Missions to Mars and the ocean worlds are cleaned and sterilised to strict standards to prevent it.
The careful containment, quarantine, and curation of returned samples in specialised facilities — keeping them pristine for science while keeping Earth safe, and preserving them for study by instruments not yet invented.
Facts on this topic will be cited from these primary and reference sources.
Mission data, planetary science, space telescopes, and public-domain imagery.
Most NASA-produced imagery is in the public domain; individual items are checked for usage terms before publication.