UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Planetary protection is the practice of protecting solar system bodies from contamination by Earth life and protecting Earth from possible life forms that may be returned from other solar system bodies. Elaine Seasly, deputy planetary protection officer at NASA, will discuss NASA’s updated planetary protection policies at 4 p.m. on Monday, April 17.
NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection promotes the responsible exploration of the solar system by implementing and developing efforts that protect the science, explored environments and Earth. Seasly’s talk, "Enabling Scientific Exploration of Space: NASA’s Updated Planetary Protection Policies," will be held 112 Walker Building on the University Park campus and via Zoom.
Over the past three years, NASA has updated its planetary protection policies and created a new technical standard to streamline and clarify requirements for mission designers and support the planetary protection practitioner community.
Seasly will discuss the relationship of these policies and standards to space law and international policy and provide a behind-the-scenes look at the process of crafting and revising policy including challenges and lessons learned.
Seasly’s talk is part of EESI’s spring 2023 EarthTalks speaker series, “Exploration of our Solar System.” With a dozen NASA missions currently in development — as well as spacecraft actively on Mars, near Jupiter and in the Kuiper belt — the current scale of mission activity is unprecedented and brings forth a new era of comparative study of varied worlds at the systems level. The 2023 spring EarthTalk series is intended to provide a venue for the expansion of participant’s horizons into our solar system.
The series is supported by Penn State’s Earth and Environmental Systems Institute. Talks are also available via Zoom. For more information about the spring 2023 series, visit the EarthTalks web page.