In order to prevent celestial bodies (other than the Earth) from microbial contamination by spacecraft (forward contamination) and the Earth and its biosphere from extraterrestrial contamination (backward contamination), each planetary mission need to meet requirements of planetary protection. At Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), several missions to Mars or Enceladus have been lately proposed and studied. In order to improve the feasibility of these missions, planetary protection technologies with regard to bioburden control should be established. In this work, we introduce our planetary protection activities, such as the development of bioburden-controlled environments, identification of bioburden contamination risk through flight hardware series of events, bioburden reduction, bioburden assays, and so forth.
We also report planetary protection implementation activities for Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) missions. MMX was classified as Category III for Mars due to its orbiter operation around the planet, and as Category II to the Phobos because of the planned landing on Phobos and flyby of Deimos during the outbound leg. In addition, MMX was classified as Category V with Unrestricted Earth Return (UER) for the inbound leg. In accordance with the planetary protection requirements, we have been carrying out (1) impact and contamination probability analyses, (2) contamination control, (3) controlled sample collection (including regolith scattering effects), (4) impact sterilization tests, (5) radiation sterilization test, etc.