Informing Planetary Protection Policies for the Future Exploration of Ceres: State of Understanding after the Dawn Mission.

We review the current state of understanding of Ceres as it relates to planetary protection policy for future landed missions, including for sample return, to the dwarf planet. The Dawn mission found Ceres to be an intriguing target for a mission, with evidence for the presence of regional, possibly extensive liquid at depth, and local expressions of recent and potentially ongoing activity. The Dawn mission also found a high abundance of carbon in the regolith, interpreted as a mix of carbonates and amorphous carbon, as well as locally high concentrations of organic matter.

A summary on cutting edge advancements in sterilization and cleaning technologies in medical, food, and drug industries, and its applicability to spacecraft hardware.

Issued primarily by COSPAR (the Committee On SPAce Research), international Planetary Protection Policies mandate that all spacecraft hardware in contact with extraterrestrial environments "of chemical evolution and/or origin of life interest and for which scientific opinion provides a significant chance of contamination which could compromise future investigations" (Kminek and Rummel, 2015) undergo biological burden control processes. These policies seek to limit the (forward) biological contamination of the target body by terrestrial microorganisms on the spacecraft, so that future missions to the target body will provide accurate and reliable scientific results. Also, these policies seek to prevent the (backward) biological contamination of the Earth by a sample returned from the target body.

A Ground Support Biobarrier (GSB) for recontamination prevention.

Planetary Protection organizations at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA), and other space agencies around the world are charged with protecting icy moons and Mars Special Regions, areas that carry an increased potential for life, from Earth biological contamination. During the spacecraft assembly process subsystems undergo functional testing, a task that verifies critical components can survive from launch through the duration of the mission. Despite efforts to keep spacecraft clean during these ground testing operations, as well as during transportation, recontamination frequently occurs and results in the need to re-clean the spacecraft, putting stress on the spacecraft assembly critical path.

Shortening of rat teeth prevents autocannibalization of surgical flaps.

Self-biting in laboratory rats is an irritating problem that can impede progress and affect the credibility of experimental interventions. Autocannibalization frequently complicates the epigastric skin flap model that is often used to evaluate flaps. In one of the authors' studies, the autocannibalization rate of 55.