Current objectives for applying the planetary protection protocol.

On October 20, 2002, the planetary protection policy document was approved, which establishes, depending on the destination of the ship, five levels of protection that all space missions must comply with. Category 1 means that it does not require any type of additional action, they are the missions that go to places like the sun, because in the sun, for many combinations in the life forms that we know in the sun, nothing would survive.

Another place that might be unlikely for life to exist would be Mercury, level four protection on this scale of planetary protection would be missions that are astrobiologically interesting and that go to Mars, Titan or Europa; level five very specific missions are those that bring or intend to bring samples to earth from places where we know there is the possibility of living beings existing, that is, a level 5 would be that mission that China and the United States intend to do on the one hand. United to bring samples from Mars.

Another level five would be to bring samples from Ceres, which was previously considered an asteroid, no longer, it is a dwarf planet, it was also considered the largest astronomical object in the asteroid belt, located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, it was believed to be a version on a reduced scale of our moon, that is, a place full of craters with a cold and boring rock landscape. When I say boring I mean that nothing was happening there, supposedly nothing was happening, it was a place where there was no geological activity, no chemical reactions and the only thing that could be expected was that from time to time an asteroid would hit Ceres creating another crater more, but in the end it turned out that Ceres is incredibly interesting and enigmatic. To begin with, not long ago it was upgraded to a dwarf planet, rather on the rebound because the issue revolved around Pluto, Ceres met the same requirements as Pluto and is now a dwarf planet, but we also now know that it is riddled with organic molecules in a study that came out on December 2.