I’d been reading a couple of articles tonight on proposed missions to Mars, and the suits that Astronauts would wear while out-and-about exploring the surface of the planet. It got me thinking about what if we discovered something interesting there. . . may not be life in and of itself, but something. There are already interplanetary contamination discussions going on across the academic arena.
But what was the idea during the Apollo missions? From Armstrong to Cernan, there sure were a hell of a lot of space suits kickin’ up some moon dust that had to reenter the LM before liftoff.
Was that iconic Airstream trailer part of the quarantine program? Did the Astronauts have to be vacuum/steam cleaned/decontaminated before meeting anyone? I guess more importantly, did the Apollo program have any influence on current thoughts/protocols we’d have for Martian-returning Astronauts?
The first three successful lunar landings involved quarantine. After that they didn’t bother anymore.
Indeed the Airstream trailer was a mobile quarantine housing. The astronauts (plus anyone else deemed to have been contaminated) were put in there.
Further, after landing the greeting party (ie the frogmen that dropped by) threw containment garments (the grey overalls) that included a face mask and filter into the capsule, and the guys put these on before exiting the capsule.
However, the whole thing was a bit of a charade, given the capsule door was opened to the air, and the frogmen were close by. One frogman did touch one of the Apollo 11 astronauts and got to stay to the trailer as well. He kept well out of the spotlight, and no-one noticed.
How much this will influence further thinking is hard to say. We don’t really have a great feeling for how the mission will even look.
Dust got everywhere. It wasn’t just a matter of kicking some inside the LM. It stuck to everything, and their suits were covered, even though they had some cleaning equipment to make a cursory clean-up, it wasn’t very effective.
Mars dust may be somewhat more agreeable; from what I’ve heard, the dust (regolith) on the moon is extremely “sharp”, since it has never been weathered by wind or water. Mars has a thin atmosphere, but the wind (and historic water) at least should have taken some of the sharp edges off.
The astronauts were quarantined, but it wasn’t to protect us from them. It was to protect them from us. They’d just spent the most stressful week+ of their lives, exposed to environments far outside what any human could possibly have evolved for, and it was considered likely that their immune systems could be compromised by that stress. You don’t want to take men in that condition and throw them into a crowd of germy Earthlings sneezing on them and shaking their hands. Give them a chance to recover and rest a bit, first.
Do you have a cite for that? I’ve never heard of that, and it doesn’t make sense when considering that the process was halted, and that the frogman cited above had no such stress.
Chronos is correct. I don’t have my space physiology reference at hand, but there was concern, based upon prior terrestrial experience, that the radiation conditions would suppress immune function and make the astronauts more prone to infection. In fact, what we’ve discovered since is that it isn’t so much the radiation as the freefall environment that tends to reduce immune system function, and astronauts are often prone to illness upon return. We no longer do a full quarantine because it isn’t really effective and is a hindrance to other medical care and observation, but astronauts are kept under observation for the first few days after return.
I have read that many astronauts also fall ill after returning to earth and once again experiencing earth gravity, Karen Nyberg did most recently and Chris Hadfield mentions this in his book. Obviously its not much of an issue as falling sick when first in space (something like 1/3 do), as they can be cared for.
But what about adjusting to Martian gravity? That could be very problematic. (The moon seems to have been ok, no one except James Irwin fell ill).
The only data we have at all about humans in any amount of gravity between 0 and 1 g is from the Apollo astronauts, and none of them stayed for any more than a few days, not nearly long enough for problems to show up. It might be easy to accommodate the gravity of the Moon or of Mars, or it might be nearly as difficult as zero g. We really have no way to know.