CMTE ON PLANETARY PROTECTION (Natl Acad), Feb 3-4, 2026, virtual

The Committee on Planetary Protection (CoPP) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will hold a virtual meeting from February 3-4, 2026 on “Enabling the Search for Life by Understanding Growth-Limiting Factors for Earth Microorganisms on Mars.”

More information is on the event’s website, which says:

The National Academies’ Committee on Planetary Protection (CoPP) is hosting a 2-day virtual meeting on February 3-4, 2026, titled, “Enabling the Search for Life by Understanding Growth-Limiting Factors for Earth Microorganisms on Mars”. The goal of this meeting would be to evaluate/revisit the existing availability of water and temperature limits and explore additional parameters that should be explored further and produce a prioritized list of the contributors to probability of growth. These will be qualitative definitions of parameters with more quantitative work being left to further activities by the CoPP and NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection in support work on planetary protection measures that enable missions to Mars. The key parameters identified during this meeting will be used for modeling probability of growth of terrestrial organisms in connection with human and robotic missions to Mars (e.g., habitat zones, exploration activities, and special regions). Moving forward, the topic of probability of growth will be explored more thoroughly, but for this meeting we are sticking to limits of life and forgoing other related topics like risk management.
The meeting will be hosted via Zoom webinar and consist of invited talks and open discussions between the speakers and CoPP with the audience invited to contribute live in writing via Slido.