ABSTRACT
Mars surface in-situ exploration started in 1975 with the American VIKING mission. Two probes landed on the northern hemisphere and provided, for the first time, detailed information on the martian terrain, atmosphere and meteorology. The current goal is to undertake larger surface investigations and many projects are being planned by the major Space Agencies with this objective. Among these projects, the Mars 94/96 mission will make a major contributor toward generating significant information about the martian surface on a large scale. Since the beginning of the Solar System exploration, planets where life could exist have been subject to planetary protection requirements. Those requirements accord with the COSPAR Policy and have two main goals: the protection of the planetary environment from influence or contamination by terrestrial microorganisms, the protection of life science, and particularly of life detection experiments searching extra-terrestrial life, and not life carried by probes and spacecrafts. As the conditions for life and survival for terrestrial microorganisms in the Mars environment became known, COSPAR recommendations were updated. This paper will describe the decontamination requirements which will be applied for the MARS 94/96 mission, the techniques and the procedures which are and will be used to realize and control the decontamination of probes and spacecrafts.
