To prevent a Martian plague, NASA needs a special lab

When Carl Sagan imagined sending humans to Mars in his book “The Cosmic Connection,” published in 1973, he posed a problem beyond such a mission’s cost and complexity: the possibility that life already existed on the red planet and that it might not play nice. Scientists have long considered Sagan’s warnings in mostly hypothetical terms. But over the approaching decade, they will start to act concretely on backward contamination risks. NASA and the European Space Agency are gearing up for a shared mission called Mars Sample Return. A rover on the red planet is currently scooping up material that will be collected by other spacecraft and eventually returned to Earth.

No one can say for sure that such material will not contain tiny Martians. If it does, no one can yet say for sure they are not harmful to Earthlings. With such concerns in mind, NASA must act as if samples from Mars could spawn the next pandemic. “Because it is not a zero-percent chance, we are doing our due diligence to make sure that there’s no possibility of contamination,” said Andrea Harrington, the Mars sample curator for NASA. Thus, the agency plans to handle the returned samples similarly to how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention handles ebola: carefully.

“Carefully,” in this case, means that once the Mars samples drop to Earth, they must be initially held in a structure called the Sample Receiving Facility. The mission’s planners say the structure should meet a standard known as “Biosafety Level 4,” or BSL-4, which means it is capable of safely containing the most dangerous pathogens known to science. But it also has to be pristine: functionally, a giant cleanroom that prevents substances on Earth from contaminating the samples from Mars.

The agency has little time to waste: If the sample return mission occurs on time — admittedly a big “if” — Mars rocks could land on Earth by the mid 2030s. It could take about as much time to build a facility that can safely contain the Martian materials, and that is if it is built on schedule, without disruption from political or public challenges.

Because no existing lab was both contained and clean enough for NASA, four scientists, including Dr. Harrington, went on a tour of some of the planet’s most dangerous facilities. She was joined by three colleagues, and they called themselves “NASA Tiger Team RAMA.” While this moniker sounds like the name of a military scouting party, it is an acronym out of the first names of the team members — Richard Mattingly of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Andrea Harrington; Michael Calaway, a contractor for the Johnson Space Center; and Alvin Smith, also of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The group visited hot spots like the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories in Boston, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s ominously and vaguely named Building 18 in Atlanta.

In total, the team visited 18 facilities that handled biological horrors, maintain ultra-cleanrooms or manufacture innovative equipment for either purpose. Members hoped to figure out what has worked at existing labs and what a NASA facility could appropriate or optimise to keep humanity safe.

To scientists like Dr. Harrington, the hurry and hurdles are worth it. “This will be the first sample return mission from another planet,” she said. The first time another world has met humans, in other words, because humans introduced them.