Comment by d4nt

Yeah, I was a at conference last year where there was a talk from an existing Planetary Protection Officer at NASA. She seemed mostly concerned with what kind of cleaning procedures had been performed on the various probes that had were going to each planet/moon. Sounds like you'd have to be the one delivering bad news like: "nope, this new probe will have to miss its launch window, because the latest science we have says that microbes could survive where it's going, so we have to cook it for 5 days"