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 […]

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Podcast: Europa in our Back Yard

Our “Beer with BMSIS” podcast for June features a conversation with Dr. Britney Schmidt titled Europa in our Backyard. Dr. Schmidt discusses her field research in Antarctica and describes how this unique landscape on Earth presents an analog to icy worlds such as Europa. Scientists have been long interested in visiting Europa–and Dr. Schmidt describes some of these efforts underway–but in the meanwhile, we can learn from remote settings in our own back yard of planet Earth to learn about […]

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