Engineering Colloquium Home
Schedule including this lecture.
Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium
Date: Monday, November 25, 2002
We have yet to discover, much less characterize, all of the environments on Earth that support life -- and this naturally limits our ability to anticipate where there may exist extraterrestrial habitat that can support life. Other factors also may limit our ability to understand the distribution and origin of life in our solar system, but in all cases these data may be lost or destroyed by the introduction of biological contamination from other sites. The job of planetary protection is to avoid cross-contamination in solar system exploration, and always to protect the Earth from hazards from the potential introduction of extraterrestrial life. This entails identifying specific sites of concern on other worlds, while taking precautions in spacecraft preparation and operation that will preserve the secrets of life that exploration seeks to uncover. Some of these precautions represent significant scientific and engineering challenges at all levels of mission design, development, and operations.
John Rummel received his doctorate from Stanford in 1985 for research in community ecology and evolution and came to NASA/Ames that year as a NRC Associate. Presently, Dr. Rummel is the NASA Planetary Protection Officer, based at NASA Headquarters. While at NASA Headquarters from 1986-1993, he held posts as the Deputy Chief of the Mission From Planet Earth Study Office, and in the Life Sciences and Solar System Exploration Divisions he served as the Exobiology Program Manager and the SETI Program Scientist, and as the Branch Chief for the Gravitational Biology, Life Support, and Biospheric Research Programs in the Life Sciences Division. He led the US teams responsible for defining joint exobiology and life support activities with the Soviet Union/Russia, and served for the first time as the NASA Planetary Protection Officer. From 1994-1998, he was the Director of Research Administration and Education at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole. He is also a Faculty Associate at the Department of Civil Engineering at Colorado State University and was detailed from there to NASA during 1999-2001. For his work at Headquarters, Dr. Rummel was the recipient of NASA performance and achievement awards, and was made a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Jim Heaney
Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov