Tiny Worms Survive Shuttle Crash

John H. Doe writes "According to CNet, tiny worms kept in special aluminum canisters aboard the space shuttle Columbia (which broke apart in the atmosphere back in Feb. 1, 2003) survived their fall to earth. The small (about 1mm long) soil roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans was found alive in four or five of the recovered canisters, after an impact 2,295 times the force of Earth's gravity."

Comments

sooo

[Anonymous Coward]

now your saying we're descendent from a bunch of half-inch alien worms? scuttlemonkey i hate you

Whuh?

[wwest4]

It shows directly that even complex small creatures originating on one planet could survive landing on another without the protection of a spacecraft."


Do I even need to say why that is specious? Um, OK: They were in canisters and they rode in a shuttle for part of re-entry.

I'm not saying panspermia's infeasible, but this event is not particularly compelling, given the circumstances.

Re:Whuh?

[NitsujTPU]

Eh, that claim is ok. They're not saying that the life forms could survive the journey through space... just a landing. They aren't even making claims that they could survive re-entry.

Yes, however, if you take it as justification of theories regarding panspermia, you would need much more evidence to back other claims.

Re:Whuh?

[baadger]

Maybe they could evolve on the rock they hit us with...i mean that hit's us?

I for one welcome our new rock steering wormy overlords.

mirror

[madpiggy_dj]

mirror http://www.thebesttrek.net/forum/index.php?topic=3 48.0

I could have sworn...

[Drakin]

Yeah, the story's been run before.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/0 1/1134217&mode=thread&tid=134&tid=160

Re:I could have sworn...

[RobotWisdom]

Galileo foresaw this 400 years ago, as I posted to soc.history.science at the time:

Galileo Galilei 1638: http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/tns 1.htm

"...Who does not know that a horse falling from a height of three or four cubits will break his bones, while a dog falling from the same height or a cat from a height of eight or ten cubits will suffer no injury? Equally harmless would be the fall of a grasshopper from a tower or the fall of an ant from the distance of the moon..."

This is rather old

[Capt'n Hector]

I hate to spoil the party, but this was news around April, 2003. This isn't really a source, but if you think about it, it's about as infallible as you can get. Behold, a Google Cache of a weblog I wrote at that time, the server of which doesn't really exist anymore. It was back in the time of Chimera before it became Camino, back when RSS was cool. But of course don't take my word, I'm sure someone else can furnish a true news source to back this up...

Tiny Worms Survive Shuttle Crash!

[cffrost]

*Whew!* What a relief!

That mission wasn't such a disaster afterall!

So?

[gellenburg]

It's not like worms have any bones to break, or complex brain structures that would suffer life-threatening subdural hematomas upon impact.

Besides, the worms were packed in loose soil offering cushioning upon impact, and have very low oxygen requirements compared to humans.

Re:So?

[jsveiga]

Agreed, and I guess not only soil cushioned the impact. If the canisters broke loose from the bulk of the section of spacecraft they were in, then they might have hit the ground at a lower speed (there's a velocity point where the G pull downwards equals the aerodynamic drag - "terminal velocity", so it will depend on mass and aerodynamics of the canister).

If they hit the ground inside a big chunk of the spacecract, then the deformation of this chunk also absorved part of the impact.

2,295 Gs of impact... I wonder where they got this number from. A rough estimative based on estimated numbers and estimated facts to produce a catchy figure, or did they actually have accelerometers on the canisters and had planned to crash-test them on the original mission?

Besides, the forces acting upon a tiny, low mass body when decelerating on impact are proportional to the mass (F=m*a), so if you drop a PET bottle with an ant inside from a 10-story building it will most probably survive the fall, and that doesn't make it Atom Ant. If you do the same and suvive getting inside a PET bottle you won't survive the impact, both because you will attain a higher terminal velocity, and because even if you hit the ground with the same speed (i.e. same decceleration), the forces acting on your body parts will be much, much higher.

Four or five?

[Pretor]

Is it to much to ask of our researchers that they manage to count to at least 5?

When they found the canisters did they count like a child? What comes first? One. And then? Two. And then? Three. And then? Four or five, I'm not sure.

Re:Four or five?

[thegarbageman]

Wouldn't they be both alive *and* dead? Schroedinger's Worm?

How hard did they fall?

[falcon5768]

after an impact 2,295 times the force of Earth's gravity.

Did they really hit that hard? I mean how did they come up with this number, cause Im sure the terminal velocity of a canister, or even fragments of the shuttle if it just happened to be in a portion of the shuttle, would have enabled it to hit at a much slower force.

Re:How hard did they fall?

[Khyron]

Seriously, this was my first thought reading this as well. Not only does that figure seem to completely ignore the likely terminal velocity of the canister, I'm betting it supposes an inelastic collision. I'm sorry, did the can of worms land on an extremely large plate of hardened titanium? No, it probably landed in dirt someplace...

Wait a minute

[HeWhoRoams]

Last time I played Worms World party my worms died after falling about 3 inches! You're telling me these worms survived a fall from space? Now thats a cheat code.
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