ARS: Do you know who your Planetary Protection Officer (PPO) is? Do you know what a PPO does? Two weeks ago, I would have answered "no" to both of those questions. Thanks to a session at the recent meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), that mystery has been cleared up. Basically, a PPO has two main jobs: to make sure that missions we send into space looking for extraterrestrial life don't end up contaminating their destinations with earthlings, and to make sure that anything we bring back to Earth doesn't accidentally end all life on Earth or turn out like the Andromeda Strain.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Engineers expect to lose contact with the private US moon lander Odysseus on Tuesday, cutting short the mission after its sideways touchdown last week.
NASA announced Tuesday that a $32.7 million Capstone spacecraft intended to try out a skewed lunar orbit had lost contact, but agency engineers are confident
