A Summary on Cutting Edge Advancements in Sterilization and Cleaning Technologies in Medical, Food, and Drug Industries, and Its Applicability to Spacecraft Hardware

Publication date: Available online 15 May 2019Source: Life Sciences in Space ResearchAuthor(s): Raffaele Gradini, Fei Chen, Richmund Tan, Laura NewlinAbstractIssued primarily by COSPAR (the Committee On SPAce Research), international planetary protection policies mandate that all spacecraft hardware in contact with extraterrestrial environments “of chemical evolution and/or origin of life interest and for which scientific opinion provides a significant chance of contamination which could compromise future investigations” (Kminek and Rummel, 2015) undergo biological burden control processes. These policies seek to limit the (forward) biological contamination of the target body by terrestrial microorganisms on the spacecraft, so that future missions to the target body will provide accurate and reliable scientific results. Also, these policies seek to prevent the (backward) biological contamination of the Earth by a sample returned from the target body. Bioburden reduction is an integral part of current space missions and its importance will magnify as bioburden requirements become more stringent in the future. Since life-detection and sample-return procedures require sterile handling in situ (to protect scientific results), subsystems and instruments which will be in contact with extraterrestrial matter must be sterilized to prevent a false positive. Since the first Viking mission, Heat Microbial Reduction (HMR) has served as a well-understood common practice for reducing b...
Source: Life Sciences in Space Research - Category: Biology Source Type: research