Forward Contamination of Mars

Submitted by Esma Bozlak to fulfill the ethics in science requirement for the Young Scientist Program at BMSIS. Mars has attracted the attention of scientists from the past to present, and going to Mars to explore with robots as well as with humans has been of interest to many people. Many successful, as well as unsuccessful, Mars missions have been attempted since the beginning of the space age. The first successful launch was done with Mariner 4 in 1964. It was the […]

November 27, 2019

Studying the Climate History of Mars – a new Habitable Worlds grant to BMSIS Scientist Dr. Jacob Haqq-Misra

Dr. Jacob Haqq-Misra of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science was recently awarded a grant by the NASA Habitable Worlds program to study the climate history of early Mars. This project will draw upon recent geologic discoveries from the ongoing exploration of Mars to understand how Mars was once able to sustain an unfrozen ocean. Dr. Haqq-Misra will collaborate with Dr. Michael Way of NASA GISS in this project, which uses computational models of the Martian climate to calculate […]

September 22, 2017

TED Talk by Armando Azua-Bustos

How can Earth teach us about extraterrestrial life? In his TED Talk, The most Martian place on Earth, Dr. Armando Azua-Bustos takes us on a tour of the Atacama Desert, his childhood home now turned into his astrobiological laboratory. Searching for signs of life on Mars, or other planets, requires careful understanding of how organisms can survive in dry and extreme environments, and Dr. Azua-Bustos’ research helps to reveal the conditions that we might find life both there and elsewhere. […]

September 12, 2017

Ethical Considerations of Altering Mars and Other Planetary Bodies

Tara Vega shares her ethics & society case study, which she completed as part of our Young Scientist Program. While studying the various factors that go into allowing permanent human settlement on Mars, I repeatedly came across many possibilities of contamination. Carrying plants, microbes, water etc., within spacecraft landings to Mars all harbor the possibility of contaminating the red planet. I use not the term contamination as negativity, but more as the result of no better way to explain such an […]

October 24, 2016

The Problems of Contaminating Mars with Earth’s Microorganisms

Rodrigo Abans shares his ethics & society case study, which he completed as part of our Young Scientist Program. There has been much concern about whether humankind is taking enough care in space exploration. There are a plethora of ethical issues. One of these concerns is the fact that anything that goes offworld carries a certain amount of dormant microorganisms. This led to the decision of destroying the Juno spacecraft by crashing it into Jupiter instead of risking an accidental crash […]

October 21, 2016

Leaving Earth, in Search of a Better Home…

Vigneshwaran Krishnamurthy shares his ethics & society case study, which he completed as part of our Young Scientist Program. We, Earthlings have taken our planet for granted. We have come far from realizing that the resources here are limited and finite. From the air we breathe to the water we consume, everything here are perishable. And with the geometrically growing population and the pollution we caused, the day we run out of resources is not very far. We had pushed the Earth to its […]

October 12, 2016

Ethics of Space Colonization

Julia Sullivan shares her ethics & society case study, which she completed as part of our Young Scientist Program. For many, the idea of space colonization may seem to be an inevitable fact, with Mars seeming to be within reaching distance, with our only obstacle being time, as our technological advances and scientific understanding no longer feel like limiting factors. This may be so, but one question that isn’t commonly considered is, should we? Yes, humans have explored and expanded across […]

September 7, 2016

Talking Mars with The New Yorker

Dr. Jacob Haqq-Misra was recently featured on the New Yorker Radio Hour in a segment titled “Why Do You Want to Go to Mars?” Archive editor Josh Rothman hosts a conversation with Dr. Haqq-Misra and Elizabeth Kolbert, a New Yorker staff writer, about the prospects and perils of attempting the human colonization of Mars. [listen to the segment at WNYC.org]

May 31, 2016

New Paper: Sovereignty on Mars

Sara Bruhns and Jacob Haqq-Misra recently published a paper titled “A pragmatic approach to sovereignty on Mars” in the journal Space Policy. Sara performed this work during her participation in the BMSIS Young Scientist Program. Below is a short summary of this idea. National space agencies and private corporations have declared plans to send humans to the red planet, with longer-term planets of settlement and resource extraction likely to follow. Such actions may conflict with the Outer Space Treaty, which […]

November 25, 2015

How to Colonize Mars

Several national space agencies and private corporations are eyeing the red planet as a target for eventual human settlement, but the language of the Outer Space Treaty creates some ambiguity about whether or not colonizing Mars is permissible. BMSIS Young Scientist Sara Bruhns discusses her ideas about “How to Colonize Mars” on the political science blog of the Guardian. Exclusive economic rights that forgo claims to sovereignty could be one approach, although revisiting the Outer Space Treaty may ultimately be […]

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