NASA named Dr. J. Nick Benardini as the agency Planetary Protection Officer within the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, effective June 7.

The Mars Ingenuity Helicopter will take its first steps toward demonstrating powered flight in the Martian atmosphere, with a first attempt at a powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet scheduled for no earlier than April 8, 2021. The helicopter rode to Mars in the Perseverance Rover's belly pan and will be deployed for flight testing from the red planet's surface in April. 

The Mars 2020 mission, including the Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity Helicopter, will land on Mars on February 18, 2021. A first on a Mars mission, the Sample Caching System included on Perseverance will collect and store short cores of Martian rocks and soils destined for future return to Earth and study with advanced instrumentation. The system is complex, including a drill for sample collection and tubes to seal and store the collected samples until a future mission can retrieve them.  

NASA released two NASA Interim Directives (NIDs) updating the agency’s requirements for robotic and human missions traveling to the Earth’s Moon and human missions traveling to Mars.

NASA recently announced a media teleconference that will take place at 3:30 p.m. Eastern, Friday, Oct. 18, to discuss recommendations presented by the Planetary Protection Independent Review Board, established in June 2019 by Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. 

The Office of Safety and Mission Assurance recently named Elaine Seasly as the deputy Planetary Protection Officer. In this role, she will be supporting the Office of Planetary Protection in its efforts to promote the responsible exploration of the solar system by implementing and developing efforts that protect the science, explored environments and Earth.

NASA’s Planetary Protection program offers the course “Planetary Protection: Policies and Practices” one to two times a year, with the next offering being Oct. 30-Nov.1, 2018 at Kennedy Space Center. This course, which has been active for more than 15 years, covers what the requirements are for Planetary Protection for robotic missions, how to meet those requirements and lessons learned from past missions.