Rocket Crashes into the Moon, But Where Did it Come From?

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A few years ago there was a poster on WP who was incensed that they were sending a probe to the sun - the probe would do its probing thing, orbit close to the sun, and once done it would just be abandoned to fall into the Sun. This poster was outraged that NASA would 'disrespect the Sun' that way. I didnt know that the sun had those kinda feelings.

I am proud to be called a "tree hugger", but even I thought that he was being silly. But he wouldnt budge from being outraged about it. Even after I pointed out that the Sun is a million times the volume of the earth (so the probe wouldnt hurt it much), and that the sun (like the earth but more so) gets natural debris raining down it in the form of meteors (made of the same kinda crap that the artifical probe is made of -carbon and iron) every minute of the day for the last five billion years .

Not just the "woke"
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is- ... oblem.html

Contaminant metal is a serious source of bacterial contamination which is one of the considerations in sending a probe to outer space
https://www.science.org/content/article ... earthlings

Okay. You have a point. I admit that the space agencies of the world need protocols (at least for a while) to keep us from contaminating places that might have their own locally evolved life (most likely only in the form of microbes- but they would still be native microbes) even in our own solar system. Mars, Titan, Ganymede, Europa, maybe other large moons (though not our own Moon) maybe the upper atmosphere (but not the surface) of Venus.

Correct, the oceans under the ice of these moons (or even under the surface of Mars) might contain a soup of microbes that are either
a. a community of different species held together in a delicate/fragile ecosystem OR
b. a single monoculture of one species robust enough to be able to survive in the highly extreme conditions

Either way, the introduction of a single earth microbe able to replicate in the planetary liquid on one of these moons or in the subsurface water of Mars could cause the extinction of the native microbial flora before anyone has a chance to study it and in a worst case scenario could alter the micro-climate or geology resulting from the microbes (here on earth microbes influence things like geology and climate).