Not on My Planet

John Rummel may own the most unusual business card in the nation’s capital.

He takes this job seriously, but Rummel admits that explaining it often prompts a grin. Who else can mingle at a Georgetown cocktail party and throw around a line like, “I’m in charge of protecting Earth from alien life-forms”?

Rummel, PhD ’85, has spent more than a decade on and off running NASA’s $2 million-a-year Planetary Protection Program. His twin assignments: to make certain that NASA space vehicles don’t unintentionally infect other planets with Earth bacteria and to prevent contaminating our own planet with microbes in rock or soil samples we might collect on a space mission.

Both manager and scientist, Rummel directs more than 100 contract engineers, biologists and other technicians. He spends much of his time away from his Washington office, supervising sterilization procedures of outgoing spacecraft and analyzing infection risks associated with NASA missions, sometimes influencing the mission itself.

Last September, acting on Rummel’s advice, NASA crashed its dying Galileo space probe into Jupiter instead of on Europa, one of the planet’s moons and itself an inviting research target. Rummel and his aides spent hundreds of hours analyzing magnetometer readings, photographs and other data transmitted by Galileo that together suggested the presence of a large, deep ocean beneath the surface of Europa. They concluded that the water might provide a habitat for microbes aboard Galileo and “strongly recommended the crash into Jupiter.”

Rummel describes that decision as an effort to avoid “forward contamination.” It was a similar fear that led his team to vigorously sanitize the two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, in preparation for their current missions. In the weeks leading up to the liftoffs last summer, Rummel and his technicians gathered at the Space Launch Complex in Cape Canaveral, Fla., to sterilize every piece of the Martian probes. All parts were assayed with biochemical agents—including one derived from the blood of horseshoe crabs—to hunt for spore-forming bacteria. Then they were pressure-sprayed with isopropyl alcohol, “baked” in special ovens and tested again. This procedure was repeated day after day until the microbe count was so low the bacteria would be unable to thrive. The sterilized parts were then placed in specially engineered germ-proof metal shrouds. Just before final assembly, they were assayed again to check for bacteria.

As launch time neared, Rummel was often on-site 12 hours a day as his team scrubbed the spacecraft clean. “With a Mars rover, that’s especially important, because it’s possible that some areas of the planet, such as the polar ice caps, could sustain bacterial life from Earth under the right conditions,” he says. “We don’t want to land on Mars in a few years and find the place swarming with our own life-forms.”

Rummel defends his program against naysayers who claim the notion of infecting other planets is far-fetched. “We only started learning in the 1970s that Earth bacteria can thrive in hydrothermal springs at over 200 degrees Fahrenheit and in other extremely hostile environments. There’s no doubt Mars possesses the kind of environmental niche that would allow some forms of Earth microbes to survive.”

To guard against a “backward contamination”—the possibility of introducing a deadly bug from another planet—Rummel scrutinizes future space-exploration projects with microbial safety in mind. “Right now, NASA is planning for a Mars landing that will collect samples and bring them home, sometime in the middle of the next decade. Long before they get here, we’ll have to build and test a [spaceship-quarantine] facility that will give us maximum assay and sterilization control over any microbial life-forms that might come back with them. Gaining that kind of environmental control at the microscopic level is enormously challenging, so we’re going to be tested fully in the years ahead.”

In fact, he may be a few eons too late. “I think the most likely scenario for contamination of our own planet probably took place 3 or 4 billion years ago, when ‘large-impact events’ were much more frequent,” Rummel adds. “I think it’s quite possible that our planet could have been contaminated by meteorites knocked from the surface of Mars.”

Rummel says he became fascinated by the complexities of “off-world biology” while studying Anolis lizard ecology at Stanford. He served six years as a Navy flight officer before joining NASA in the early ’90s, and that experience combined with his biology expertise soon landed him the planetary protection responsibility. Longtime colleague and former NASA Director of Solar System Exploration Colleen Hartman says Rummel is ideally suited to the job. “He’s a remarkably dedicated and accomplished scientist, and he has a terrific sense of humor.”

That sense of humor comes in handy when your job is the stuff of science fiction, and Rummel plays along with pop culture references to alien bad guys. He sometimes dons a pair of jet-black Ray-Ban sunglasses—the style worn by actor Tommy Lee Jones for the Men in Black movies. He laughs at the suggestion that he might one day prevent a real-life invasion of the body snatchers.

“Fortunately, NASA isn’t responsible for the kind of situation that took place in The Blob,” he says, recalling the 1958 film in which Steve McQueen and friends thwart an alien organism with an appetite for teenagers. “I don’t think it’s very likely that such life-forms could reach Earth via a meteorite. And if it did happen, I don’t think I’d be much help. If Steve McQueen couldn’t get the job done, what chance would I have?

“Besides, if an alien like E.T. ever showed up on Earth, NASA would probably refer it to Immigration and Naturalization.”

Tom Nugent is a freelance writer in Hastings, Mich.