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The Conversation
The Conversation
Kirsten Banks, Lecturer, School of Science, Computing and Engineering Technologies, Swinburne University of Technology

Spacefarers may contaminate other worlds – but scientists have plans to keep the cosmos clean

Debris on the surface of Mars from the Perseverance mission, captured on April 19 2022. NASA/JPL-Caltech

In his inauguration speech in January, United States President Donald Trump declared the US would “plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars”.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. In 2017, in Trump’s previous term of office, he promised to “establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars”. And his billionaire adviser Elon Musk is famously obsessed with colonising the red planet.

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