This study, commissioned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), examines the role of robotic exploration missions in assessing the risks to the first human missions to Mars. Only those hazards arising from exposure to environmental, chemical, and biological agents on the planet are assessed. To ensure that it was including all previously identified hazards in its study, the Committee on Precursor Measurements Necessary to Support Human Operations on the Surface of Mars referred to the most recent report from NASA's Mars Exploration Program/ Payload Analysis Group (MEPAG) (Greeley, 2001). The committee concluded that the requirements identified in the present NRC report are indeed the only ones essential for NASA to pursue in order to mitigate potential hazards to the first human missions to Mars.

This study, commissioned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), examines the role of robotic exploration missions in assessing the risks to the first human missions to Mars. Only those hazards arising from exposure to environmental, chemical, and biological agents on the planet are assessed. To ensure that it was including all previously identified hazards in its study, the Committee on Precursor Measurements Necessary to Support Human Operations on the Surface of Mars referred to the most recent report from NASA's Mars Exploration Program/ Payload Analysis Group (MEPAG) (Greeley, 2001). The committee concluded that the requirements identified in the present NRC report are indeed the only ones essential for NASA to pursue in order to mitigate potential hazards to the first human missions to Mars.

This Web site is an electronic version of a study report written in 2002 that examines the role of robotic exploration missions in assessing the risks to the first human missions to Mars. Visitors are taught that current science rover activities do not provide an adequate research base for the development of rovers needed for the human exploration of Mars. Come and explore what changes need to be made and why.

This volume includes 14 papers from the National Academy of Engineering's Tenth Annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium held in September 2004. The U.S. Frontiers meeting brings together 100 outstanding engineers (ages 30-45) to learn from their peers and discuss leading-edge technologies in a range of fields. The 2004 symposium covered these four areas: engineering for extreme environments, designer materials, multiscale modeling, and engineering and entertainment. Papers in the book cover topics such as scalable mobile robots for deployment in polar climates, the challenges of landing on Mars, thin-film active materials, vascular tissue engineering, small-scale processes and large-scale simulations of the climate system, simulating physically accurate illumination in computer graphics, and designing socially intelligent robots, among others. Appendixes include information about the contributors, the symposium program, and a list of the meeting participants. The book is the tenth in a series covering the topics of the U.S. Frontiers of Engineering meetings.

One of the highest-priority activities in the planetary sciences identified in published reports of the Space Studies Board's Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration (COMPLEX) and in reports of other advisory groups is the collection and return of extraterrestrial samples to Earth for study in terrestrial laboratories. In response to recommendations made in such studies, NASA has initiated a vigorous program that will, within the next decade, collect samples from a variety of solar system environments. In particular the Mars Exploration Program is expected to launch spacecraft that are designed to collect samples of martian soil, rocks, and atmosphere and return them to Earth, perhaps as early as 2015. International treaty obligations mandate that NASA conduct such a program in a manner that avoids the cross-contamination of both Earth and Mars. The Space Studies Board's 1997 report Mars Sample Return: Issues and Recommendations examined many of the planetary-protection issues concerning the back contamination of Earth and concluded that, although the probability that martian samples will contain dangerous biota is small, it is not zero.1 Steps must be taken to protect Earth against the remote possibility of contamination by life forms that may have evolved on Mars. Similarly, the samples, collected at great expense, must be protected against contamination by terrestrial biota and other matter. Almost certainly, meeting these requirements will entail opening the sample-return container in an appropriate facility on Earth-presumably a BSL-4 laboratory-where testing, biosafety certification, and quarantine of the samples will be carried out before aliquots are released to the scientific community for study in existing laboratory facilities. The nature of the required quarantine facility, and the decisions required for disposition of samples once they are in it, were regarded as issues of sufficient importance and complexity to warrant a study by the Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration (COMPLEX) in isolation from other topics. (Previous studies have been much broader, including also consideration of the mission that collects samples on Mars and brings them to Earth, atmospheric entry, sample recovery, and transport to the quarantine facility.) The charge to COMPLEX stated that the central question to be addressed in this study is the following: What are the criteria that must be satisfied before martian samples can be released from a quarantine facility?

The history of exploration and establishment of new lands, science and technologies has always entailed risk to the health and lives of the explorers. Yet, when it comes to exploring and developing the high frontier of space, the harshest frontier ever, the highest value is apparently not the accomplishment of those goals, but of minimizing, if not eliminating, the possibility of injury or death of the humans carrying them out. For decades since the end of Apollo, human spaceflight has been very expensive and relatively rare (about 500 people total, with a death rate of about 4%), largely because of this risk aversion on the part of the federal government and culture. From the Space Shuttle, to the International Space Station, the new commercial crew program to deliver astronauts to it, and the regulatory approach for commercial spaceflight providers, our attitude toward safety has been fundamentally irrational, expensive and even dangerous, while generating minimal accomplishment for maximal cost. This book entertainingly explains why this means that we must regulate passenger safety in the new commercial spaceflight industry with a lighter hand than many might instinctively prefer, that NASA must more carefully evaluate rewards from a planned mission to rationally determine how much should be spent to avoid the loss of participants, and that Congress must stop insisting that safety is the highest priority, for such insistence is an eloquent testament to how unimportant they and the nation consider the opening of this new

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