Recovery and transport of samples

Recovery and transport of returned samples is a crucial importance issue, because it has the fundamental duty to avoid forward contamination (i.e., contamination of the sample from the terrestrial environment) and, in the case of samples returned from a planetary body possibly hosting any life form, backward contamination (i.e., contamination of non-terrestrial organisms to humans). This chapter reviews how sample return missions dealt with this issue, through description of: i) landing sites and their influence on recovery and transport operations; ii) analysis of techniques and technologies used so far to transport extra-terrestrial samples from landing sites to curation facilities as well as among laboratory environments; iii) regulatory issues for packaging and transport of restricted samples, i.e., potentially hosting biological molecules.