Unknown bacteria were launched to Mars.

in Popular STEM4 days ago

Unknown bacteria were launched to Mars.




Another piece of research on bacteria in space has come out, it was published on May 12 and it is quite disturbing. This research has been done by an international team of scientists who have identified dozens of previously unknown microorganisms that can survive in sterile conditions and potentially threaten space missions.


This research was carried out by scientists from NASA's jet propulsion laboratory along with colleagues from India and Saudi Arabia. They have discovered 26 species of bacteria that were not known before in the clean room where the Phoenix spacecraft was assembled, before its launch to Mars. This mission was launched in 2007 and it seems to me that they have taken a long time to do this research.




Specifically, they identified 215 strains of bacteria, but these 25 are quite disturbing and this means that the Phoenix ship surely traveled to Mars with some of these bacteria, remember that in another investigation a few weeks ago it was said that some bacteria and some microorganisms can resist the conditions of Mars.


The Phoenix spacecraft arrived on Mars on May 25, 2008. Its mission was to collect samples and drill to look for ice at the poles of the red planet, specifically near the poles, because it did not reach that far north, nor that far south. I think it was in the northern hemisphere where it landed quite far north, but not directly at the pole, and also to look for chemical signs of some potential form of primitive life on Mars.



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These images above are from an excavation carried out by the mission, the brightest white spots are water ice, in the area where I landed there were a few centimeters from the surface, scratching the dust and rocks on the Martian surface there was water ice, if you see a variation in the gifs, between some images and others, it is because the ice in contact with the sun with the little heat from the sun it received sublimated, that is, it went from solid to gaseous without passing through due to the state of water, but the Phoenix spacecraft will have left some bacteria there in that ice layer, there is a question for future human missions to Mars.


It seems that we will not be able to detach ourselves from the bacteria and the ecosystem that surrounds us, sending a ship that is completely sterile is going to be complicated and sending a ship that is completely sterile to an environment where there may be liquid water, for example, on the Moon Europa can be worrying, apart from the evolution that these bacteria and these microorganisms can have in the space environment or in extreme environments such as what is on Mars.


This issue of terrestrial bacteria that evolve in space is very disturbing, it can give us a lot of problems, but we will have to see how to control it in some way, because sooner or later we will have to go to a place where we have a good chance of finding life, because at the end of the day what we are looking for is life outside of Earth, if we cannot analyze these life forms for fear of contagion either from us to them or from them to us, how are we going to be able to study them? How are we going to be able to know them in depth?


We will have to start thinking about protocols, about systems, perhaps what American and European researchers basically proposed a few months ago and that was to have a space station dedicated to studying samples that arrive from the Moon Europe or Mars, fresh samples that may contain microorganisms and have it as a quarantine zone, for example, but it is a very complex issue.


By the way, there is a very good movie called “Life” that plans the same thing, I recommend it if you haven't seen it and it doesn't end well at all.




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