why should China be allowed to contaminate
another planet with their SAR_CoV-2?
they already destroyed Earth.
All this courtesy of Clinton/Loral. Ugh!
Maybe they intend to unleash alien bugs.
Al kidding aside, "backward contamination" is taken seriously by NASA, and we all know now what slobs the Chinese are about health & safety.
Didn’t think of that.
During the Apollo era, one of the missions brought back parts of a probe that had landed some time before. NASA was able to revive staph bacteria that hitched a ride on the original craft, surviving the alternating periods of heat, UV, solar winds, and extreme cold for 18 months or more.
Standards were developed after that to minimize transporting Earth bacteria around the solar system.