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Hriday Unadkat
Student - NASA Intern - Policy Director
Hriday Unadkat is a student at Princeton University studying aerospace engineering and public policy.1 He is also the co-founder of the Policy Initiatives Institute.2 Some key points about Hriday include:
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Hriday has a diverse background combining aerospace engineering, policy work, and scientific research, with a focus on space-related projects and initiatives.
Highlights
I’ve been talking about orbital space debris a lot, but interplanetary contamination is equally important to consider.
Interplanetary contamination can occur forwards (we contaminate another celestial body) or backwards (another body could contaminate the Earth), and typically refers to the biological contamination of microbial life between two celestial bodies.
This is understandably important: imagine one day we discover microbes on Earth, just to find out that they’re Earthly in origin. Or, imagine one day we contaminate Mars with microbes that begin to evolve and spread on Mars! Or, imagine one day we bring back rock samples from Venus that contain microbes that are dangerous to our immune systems—the possibilities are endless.
Policies like the Outer Space Treaty or the COSPAR guidelines aim at preventing forward contamination by sterilizing all spacecraft before being launched into space, and hope to prevent backward contamination by standardizing quarantine protocols.
As a fun fact, the Apollo 11 astronauts (see pic below) were quarantined upon arrival from the moon for three weeks, precisely to prevent any possible back contamination.
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On February 14, 1980, NASA launched the nearly-doomed SolarMax Mission.
The plan for the SolarMax Satellite was to investigate solar flares, sunspots, and other behaviors associated with our Sun!
However, when it attempted to begin operations in the early 1980s, the satellite could not retain its lock on the Sun -- likely because an engineer assembled some of the electrical wires in a different orientation than planned, affecting the onboard guidance and control systems.
Instead of the mission ending up to be a complete failure, NASA was able to schedule a mission to repair the satellite around 1984, resulting in a successful set of observations until the end of the decade!
The sheer innovation and problem-solving skills that NASA exhibited during this trying moment of near-failure should serve to be an inspiration for us all!
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