Posted on 08/23/2010 6:00:42 AM PDT by decimon
Professor Charles Cockell from the OU explains how the experiment worked
A small English fishing village has produced an out-of-this-world discovery.
Bacteria taken from cliffs at Beer on the South Coast have shown themselves to be hardy space travellers.
The bugs were put on the exterior of the space station to see how they would cope in the hostile conditions that exist above the Earth's atmosphere.
And when scientists inspected the microbes a year and a half later, they found many were still alive.
These survivors are now thriving in a laboratory at the Open University (OU) in Milton Keynes.
The experiment is part of a quest to find microbes that could be useful to future astronauts who venture beyond low-Earth orbit to explore the rest of the Solar System.
Study leader Dr Karen Olsson-Francis told BBC News: "It has been proposed that bacteria could be used in life-support systems to recycle everything.
"There is also the concept that if we were to develop bases on the Moon or Mars, we could use bacteria for 'bio-mining' - using them to extract important minerals from rocks."
This type of research also plays into the popular theory that micro-organisms can somehow be transported between the planets in rocks - in meteorites - to seed life where it does not yet exist.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Space travel ping.
Ah ha, so there is beer in heaven.
THX THX.
Anyone figure the editor is chuckling to himself, “Ha! Made you look!”?
So they took microbes, attached them to the unsheilded outside of a space station, let them be irradiated for a year, and brought them back to earth, where they are now being coddled at a research facility.
No, no way this can turn out bad. :-)
Actually, this is the best argument for NOT bringing soil samples from Mars.
The Russians have a mission planned to do just that from Phobos.
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I wonder how many billions it cost the US taxpayer to establish that fact.
Actually the fears are overblown..
It happened outside the International Space Station. Who do you think is the largest single economic supporter of the ISS? The US Taxpayer. Although there are five primary owners of the station, and another dozen contributors, the US has EASILY born the lion's share of the financial burden.
I think the US taxpayer paid for it precisely because the US taxpayer paid for it.
And you know this how? Are you sure Mars is sterile? Of course not.
It is a foolish endeavor to bring material from a planet that may harbor life in some form. You may trust the Russians or Chinese to 'do it right'. I certainly don't.
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