NASA is hiring for Planetary Protection Officer position

The position NASA is procuring for, with the stunning title of Planetary Protection Officer is presumably not at all like what we would have expected.

A Planetary Protection Officer job, does actually defends the alien life. Sounds very fictional isn’t it? Speaking of combating aliens makes us overwhelmed. Well that is what the Planetary Protection Officer does. Exploring the contamination procedures and how to legitimately sterilize automated equipment.

It couldn't be any more obvious, that we are not trying to keep alien life far from Earth. By all means, that is precisely what we're hunting down. We don't need it inadvertently adhered to a Mars rover tramps, yet despite everything we want it. What we certainly don't want is the Earth’s life contaminating another planet or moon.

First of all, we shouldn't be spreading our own life to an alien ecosystem, since that could affect a colossal segment of organisms that is not used to earthbound lifeforms, for example, microbes. Secondly, we prefer not to coincidentally "discover" life on another planet just to recognize that it's our own.

Ever wondered if the Mars rovers had landed on the red planet loaded with microbes. It is most likely possible for the microbes to survive there. This could give a wrong data in future as we wouldn’t know if it is our own life form or aliens when the survived microbes that is present, might look alike. Keeping the rovers clean in any case makes that procedure of removal significantly less demanding.

Indeed, even the spacecraft that are going on flybys must be decontaminated, in case they crash land on the domain that they actually supposed to zoom past.

This is a great deal which seems harder than it appears. Microscopic organisms are amazing survivors and they live on fundamentally everything. That implies that each and every modest piece of a spacecraft must be decontaminated. It needs to remain clean until the point it lifts off.

Before Curiosity went to Mars, there were rumours after a group didn't get legitimate authorization to open a set of three tools inside a sterilized box. That is how serious of a contamination is taken by the authorities.

Then again, we didn't try to decontaminate the Voyagers before they took off to profound space, since they weren't bound to land on any planets. Expecting that they don't run into anything, they shouldn't be risking the contamination. What's more, as one What If? XKCD post brought up, that a huge number of Earth microbes are possibly shooting through space at the present time.