BBC, Redorbit: Bacteria survive in space—outside the capsule
International space station
Sounds impossible, but the interview clip at BBC seems real. The experiment by Karen Olsson-Francis, Charles Cockrell and colleagues at the Open University in England was intended to see which, if any, microbes could survive in space.
The team took a chip of limestone from a cliff in a town called Beer in Devon that had microbes growing in the rock. They busted it into bits, and put the little bits on disks that were flow up to the space station and attached to the outside of the capsule. They were left for 553 days. When the chips got back to the lab, they were put into a growth medium in a tube. After awhile, the liquid turned green. Dr. Cockrell said there was only one survivor–a blue-green algae that one researcher in Redorbit’s story said “resemble closely a group of cyanobacteria known as Gloeocapsa… They have a thick cell wall and this could be part of the reason they survived so long in space.”
These may be the most extreme conditions ever for bugs that have been studied—intense UV, no air, no water, and really chilly. The idea, the scientists said was not only curiosity about extreme conditions, but if these bugs can really do this, why not start thinking about bringing them to other planets to produce oxygen for colonists? Be difficult to do the environmental impact statement on that one.
–Phil Hilts
August 23rd, 2010 at 5:21 pm
Does this not mean…
If bacteria from earth can survive space, could not bacteria from space – from SOMEWHERE ELSE – survive meteoric flights to the surface of the early earth, billions of years ago back in The Day before there was an atmosphere to assure a sterilizing fire-y end to later such visitors. Which would raise the distinct possibility that life here, (which ultimately gave rise to the very atmosphere that now protects us), in fact started OUT THERE.
August 23rd, 2010 at 7:25 pm
Indeed it does – hence all the fuss years ago when a team based at the NASA Johnson Space Flight Center asserted that they’d found fossils of microorganisms in a rock that had been recovered as it sat upon the ice in Antarctica. Its chemistry said it came from Mars. There was much to do about the chance that if the environs of the fossils survived so nicely, they could plausibly have ferried a few living organisms to Earth. From that arose wonderment whether life on Earth is actually Martian in origin. Or, that perhaps in more meteoritic times the planets exchanged samples of their biomes a few times. The biology of the Martian meteorite, ALH 8401, is now in rather bad odor ( although for some it is still a plausible hypothesis). The speculations it inspired were and remain legitimate.
– Just checkin’ in on the site from vacation / Charlie
August 24th, 2010 at 11:46 am
Here’s a piece I wrote in 2002 on similar research:
http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/318/surviving-the-final-frontier
August 24th, 2010 at 9:52 pm
And here is a piece I published in Discover in 2001:
http://discovermagazine.com/2001/aug/featmars
Folks at NASA Ames, and elsewhere, have pursued the panspermia hypothesis in many ways over the years. Some of panspermia’s most ardent advocates, however, are viewed as fringe researchers at best.