Life on the moon

[Bettina]

I don't usually read my dads Popular Mechanics but the issue he just got had a front cover titled "Are we alone". One thing I found interesting was this quote on page 73...

 

" In 1969 the Apollo 12 crew found a common Earth bacterium had survived for three years inside Surveyor 3's stranded camera... with no atmosphere, no water, no energy or nutrients, and a temperature at minus 400F."

 

Cool huh?

 

Bee

[CanadaAotS]

I wouldnt be surprised if somehow, the few million bacteria or so that was left on equipment left on the moon and/or mars has somehow evolved itself and is reproducing...

 

Life (especially those damn hardy bacteria lol) tend to adapt their way out of extremely intense enviroments.

 

The rovers that were sent to mars were subjected to extreme sanitization... similar to being out in space actually. They put them in a vacuum, put them through intense radiation etc. to kill off any lifeforms since they didnt want to 'infect' mars with our bacteria

 

Turns out they made an environment perfect for bacteria to live through space... Radiation resistant, vacuum resistant

 

These super bacteria are probably colonizing mars as we speak

[Bluenoise]

I wouldnt be surprised if somehow, the few million bacteria or so that was left on equipment left on the moon and/or mars has somehow evolved itself and is reproducing...

 

Umm they can't evolve to reproduce, since you have to reproduce to evolve...

[CanadaAotS]

pffft fine, reproduce then evolve

 

maybe not the moon bacteria, but theres a very good chance that bacteria left on the rovers can survive and reproduce on mars.

 

The enviroment that NASA created forced them to sustain themselves on the rovers themselves. I'll go look it up in Discover magazine archives and quote it if you like.

 

EDIT:

 

Found it here

Requires a membership though, so I'll just quote it.

First' date=' however, you must be decontaminated. A visitor places one foot, then the other, into an automatic shoe scrubber, a box on the floor with spinning bristles that flagellate the soles for a minute or so. A guide provides blue paper booties to slip over shoes, a blue shower cap to cover hair, and a white gown, made of paper with a shiny cling-free coating, to wear over your clothing. Finally, an air shower—a glass booth with several nozzles blowing furiously. Then and only then, ruffled but purified, may you enter. Inside the facility, a company of blue-bootied, shower-capped, paper-gowned technicians fuss over the skeletons of spacecraft-to-be. The room is arid as a desert, the humidity a drastically low 42 percent. The floors are regularly scrubbed to remove dander and bacteria. NASA’s intent is to create an environment hostile to any microbes that might hitch a ride aboard the outbound spacecraft yet benign to the human engineers who must assemble these delicate vehicles. If that sounds like an impossibility, it is. Welcome to the paradox of planetary protection.

 

In 1967, inspired by a new international outer-space treaty, the space-racing nations of the world agreed to spare no effort in preventing the potential spread of organisms from one moon or planet to another. At NASA, this mandate evolved into an official planetary protection policy, a Sisyphean effort to shield the universe from the people exploring it.

 

Traditionally, the assumed beneficiary of planetary protection has been the planet Earth. We’ve all seen the movies, we know the disaster scenarios: Extraterrestrial spores return from outer space, and in no time the citizens of Earth are heaps of dust or brain-dead zombies. Accordingly, NASA has developed an elaborate quarantine protocol to handle soil samples retrieved from other planets—comforting, perhaps, but statistically of marginal value. Contagion spreads from the haves to the have-nots, and so far as scientists have yet determined, Earth is the only planet with life to give. Besides, virtually all the spacecraft that leave Earth depart on one-way missions: They drift eternally through interstellar space, or they burn up in foreign atmospheres, or they sit on Mars, never rusting, transmitting data until their batteries fade away. Among all the lawns in the cosmos, ours is the one with dandelions, and the wind is blowing outward.

 

No, if anybody should be worried about biocontamination, it’s our planetary neighbors. In the coming decade, NASA has scheduled no less than four major missions to Mars to grope for hints of water or life. Down the road is a robot that will drill below the icy surface of the Jovian moon Europa to probe a briny ocean believed to exist there, and the Titan Biological Explorer, which will plumb the atmosphere of the Saturnian moon Titan for the chemical precursors of life. Interplanetary traffic is picking up, and NASA would like to avoid going down in history as the agency that accidentally turned the Red Planet green with life.

 

But the true worry isn’t ecological; it’s epistemological. Any earthly contamination—of the Martian soil or of the instruments sent to study it—would seriously muddy the multibillion-dollar hunt for extraterrestrial life. As Kenneth Nealson, a University of Southern California geobiologist and Jet Propulsion Laboratory visiting scientist, recently told the journal Nature: “The field is haunted by thinking you’ve detected life on Mars and finding that it’s Escherichia coli from Pasadena.” As it turns out, that fear is well founded. Not only does microbial life survive in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility; in some cases it thrives there. There is no question whether we’re exporting life into the cosmos—we absolutely are. What’s left to determine is exactly what kind of life is emigrating and how far it is spreading.

[/quote']

 

In recent years NASA biologists have discovered numerous species of microbes living on the doorstep to the cosmos—in spacecraft-assembly facilities' date=' on rovers, orbiters, and flight-ready circuit boards, and aboard the International Space Station. Some are commonplace species; others are entirely new and appear to have adapted to—and perhaps even evolved in—the harsh conditions that NASA decontaminators have devised expressly to eliminate them. Now they’re off to Mars, Saturn, and Europa. Almost certainly a few are already there, alive, quietly waiting for their tiny moment in the sun

 

BACILLUS SAFENSIS

 

Highly resistant to gamma and UV radiation, B. safensis is named for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Spacecraft Assembly Facility (SAF), in which it lives. It can also be found on the current Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.

 

BACILLUS SUBTILIS

 

This spore-forming bacterium is common in soils, dust, and watery habitats—and in the assembly facilities at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Kennedy Space Center, as well as aboard the Mars Odyssey orbiter.

 

BACILLUS NEALSONII

 

A double-spore coating makes this bac-terium especially resistant to gamma radiation, one of the chief obstacles to any potential life on Mars. B. nealsonii, a new species, is particularly well adapted to the dry environment of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory SAF, where it was first discovered.

 

BACILLUS ODYSSEYI

 

A new species, B. odysseyi is one of a dozen microbes found on the surface of the Mars Odyssey orbiter, which has been circling Mars since October 2001. Protected by an extra spore layer, it is 10 times more resistant than B. subtilis to gamma radiation and desiccation.

 

BACILLUS PUMILIS

 

The likely evolutionary ancestor of B. safensis (above), this bacterium has been found in NASA’s spacecraft-assembly facilities and on Mars Odyssey and current Mars rovers. The microbe derives energy from aluminum and titanium; in spore form, it eludes the standard methods of life detection.

 

BACILLUS CEREUS

 

Like B. pumilis and B. subtilis, the spore-forming B. cereus is commonplace in terrestrial habitats, in harsh NASA environments, and—perhaps increasingly—elsewhere in the universe. It has been found living in the intestines of arthropods and in the water supply of the Mir space station.

[/quote']

 

So as you can see, mars is a cake walk for such organisms, and if they reproduce on mars they will climatize themselves to it.

 

I think its awesome that life has pretty much started on mars... there's no doubt about it