Image: Photo Researchers, Inc.
A round-trip journey to Mars would probably kill a crew of astronauts, unless they had some futuristic defense against radiation from the sun and from galactic cosmic rays. Would microbes be hardy enough to survive? We may soon find out.
The Planetary Society, a nonprofit based in Pasadena, Calif., has packed a handful of miniature space travelers—bacteria, yeast, even tiny invertebrate animals—into a capsule on the Russian Phobos–Grunt spacecraft, expected to launch as soon as November 8. The experiment, called Phobos LIFE, for Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment, is designed to test the hypothesis that early life could have hopped from one planet to another on board meteoroids.
Phobos–Grunt will not only take microbes to Phobos and back, but will also scoop up soil samples and return them to Earth—an ambitious feat never before accomplished on another planet's moon. (Read more about the mission here.) If all goes according to plan, the round-trip will take three years.
Click here for a slide show of five Phobos LIFE passengers.
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8 Comments
Add CommentSo... they do not view this as a possible contamination situation? Or is there a mechanism in place to sterilize these lifeforms if something goes wrong, like loss of control and crashing into Mars?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe microbes are not going to the planet, only to the russian capsule
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think BillR's question was actually "What will happen to the container in case of a crash?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell, let's hope everything will be OK, 'cause I'm itching to see the results of this mission.
I HOPE there is successful contamination. Are people truly worried about contamination of a small, dust covered rocky moon? We should be contaminating it on purpose and hoping for the best!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI love the idea of science not interfering, or contaminating a possible bio system - but Phobos is NOT Europa or Enceladus. If we have organisms here that can reproduce and thrive in a place as inhospitable as Phobos, then what's to keep us from terraforming a place like mars and letting the metabolic processes of microbes prepare the planet for more earth like organisms. These small bodied worlds look like the best place for real experimentation - not worlds that should be carefully isolated and left to evolve.
OK, I know the WHYS of not contaminating a pristine environment.... I like to understand the WHY NOT Start bioengineering..NOW? An automated biosphere is possible. Why not find now what organisms will survive and produce O, CO2, h,...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLets place automated construction equipment to build shelters tunnels, place a power plant to recharge this equipment. Could place a power generator on or near polar and experimental on producing H2O, hydrolysis creating O2 and H....
Torchlake,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBefore you start terraforming, you need to understand all the cause and effects. We cannot even figure out our own environment, how are we going to plan changing some other environment....
And there is always a possibility that Phobos can get nudged by a large asteroid and end up hitting Mars as well. There is a lot of speculation that Phobos is actually a captured asteroid.
Consider that the unprotected exposure of a crashed experiment on Phobos caused genetic modifications that allowed the life to survive. But we later find that our exposure to those modified lifeforms is deadly to all life on Earth. Would you still want to throw all caution to the wind and do it anyways? I am afraid the answer would still be "Why not!"... <sigh>
Mr. Matson and Mr. Musser are just plain old wrong. There is no scientific evidence that a round trip mission to Mars would "probably kill a crew of astronauts" as they put it. For one the amount of radiation they would be exposed to while certainly not good for you would not "kill the crew". Yes radiation increases the probability of someone getting cancer in their life time, but the uptick associated with lets say a year and half trip to and from Mars will raise your cancer odds by a few precnt. On top of that protection against solar activity only requires a warning system for the crew (we already have a warning system for the planet) and a temporary shelter where the crew can ride out the storm, a technology which is old-fashioned not futuristic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNeither you and Matson/Musser are completely correct. NASA estimates that the risk of contracting fatal cancer for an astronaut enduring a 1000 day Mars trip is between 4% and 19%, on top of the 20% risk that the average male already has. So if it's 4%, that's not that big of a deal, but if it's 19% then a Mars astronaut would have a nearly 40% chance of dying from cancer, which is unacceptable. Also, the biggest risk of harm is apparently from interstellar cosmic rays, not solar flares. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/17feb_radiation/
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