The microbe was gathered from the agency’s clean rooms, where experts build spacecraft in carefully controlled environments. The findings reveal gaps in the agency’s procedures to prevent durable hitchhikers A shell that protected the Perseverance rover during its descent to Mars in a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory NASA / JPL-Caltech As scientists search for life beyond Earth, spacecraft need to avoid accidentally bringing organisms from our home planet to other celestial bodies. It would be unfortunate to discover that an “alien” life form was simply a hitchhiker. That’s why NASA and other countries’ space agencies follow “ planetary protection ” protocols, which call for sterilization and other measures to curb potential contamination. They mostly focus on getting rid of Earthly bacteria . However, some microbes might be slipping through the cleaning cracks.…