ESA Conducts Mars Terraforming Experiments On ISS

geegel writes "Space is a hostile environment for living things, but small organisms on the Expose-E experiment unit outside Europe's Columbus ISS laboratory module have resisted the solar UV radiation, cosmic rays, vacuum and varying temperatures for 18 months. A certain lichen seems to be particularly happy in open space."

Comments

Let us get this out of the way...

[sznupi]

I, for one, welcome our Mars-terraforming lichen overlords.

fuck they gonna get cosmic ray powerz

[jollyreaper]

Then come back to earth and take us over. Underworld: Rise of the Lichen. Gonna net to get some space reindeer to save us.

Re:fuck they gonna get cosmic ray powerz

[Chris Burke]

Yeah, exposure to gamma radiation is going to cause the lichen to turn into a giant green(-er) beast of unstoppable power whenever it gets angry.

Fortunately, lichens are pretty mellow.

Re:fuck they gonna get cosmic ray powerz

[IdleTime]

The Hulks is in reality a lichen?

Who could have thunk?

Re:fuck they gonna get cosmic ray powerz

[kehren77]

We'll be fine as long as their powerz level isn't over 9000.

Re:fuck they gonna get cosmic ray powerz

[Tristanic]

Day of the Triffids wasn't a movie, it was an omen!

Re:fuck they gonna get cosmic ray powerz

[biryokumaru]

Underworld: Rise of the Lichen

It's funny because you likened the lichen to Lycans.

Of the space variety

[PlasmaEye]

I guess you could say that fungus was lichen space. *crickets*

Re:Of the space variety

[snspdaarf]

Man, oh, man. You owe the internet an apology for that one.

Re:Of the space variety

[LS]

* vacuum, vacuum very much! *

Mars

[Chris Lawrence]

The purpose of this isn't really to teraform Mars. That is way too far off in the future. At this point we don't even have an idea when humans will finally get there. The real goal of this research is to understand the limits to life in extreme environments. This can help us to better understand where we might find life and whether it is possible that there might still be life on Mars today. Glad to see some useful research being done on the ISS after all the time and effort to get it up there.

Re:Mars

[Chris Lawrence]

Yes, but it was way behind schedule and for a long time had only a minimum crew. They needed to spend all their time just maintaining the station which didn't leave any time for scientific research. Now, finally, they have a full crew and can actually get down to business.

Re:Mars

[TheRealMindChild]

Imagine it! A dyson sphere of kudzu!!!

Re:Mars

[kenp2002]

The purpose of this isn't really to teraform Mars. That is way too far off in the future.

Actually terraforming a planet with plant life isn't necessarily a slow process at all. If we agree on the idea of human made global warming we have made substantial changes to a planet's ecosystem in a short amount of time.

Given the growth rate of a variety of micro organisms and small less complicated plant life we can induce a massive change in Mar's ecosystem in a short amount of time.

Here is a simple example. Given the growth rate of a species of plant that can survive on Mars. X rate of growth over Y distance. Without any natural predators the upper limit of that growth is R based on resources. Until we hit R in general we are talking near exponential growth (not taking into account localize competition with thins out the existing population.) Given this basic idea the mobility of plant life on Mars could be substantial (We are talking a radius increase of hundreds of miles per year.) You could literally cover an entire planet in a plant (again barring predators and R limits) with the lifetime of a human being.

Obviously there are a multitude of inhibitors to such growth but, if we can confirm there is no existing life on Mars there is nothing preventing us from launching a giant rocket to Mars fill with a good cocktail of microbes, algeas, etc and seed bombing the piss outta the planet and letting natural selection establish an ecosystem. I argue the opposite. Make the planet into a giant industrial factory where raw pollutants are just dumped out the window. Anything capable of living in that environment would have to thrive on said wastes.

Re:Mars

[OolimPhon]

You misunderstand. Actually building the thing has involved a whole lot of new engineering and scientific knowledge.

Doing experiments now it's up there is fine, but just getting it up there taught us a lot (including, the shuttle was a bad idea).

Re:Mars

[eleuthero]

I'd like to see them just seed Mars with the lichen now. If it turns out to be problematic, it isn't like it is our own planet (or like it even has life to speak of that we need be concerned about). Put some kudzu cells in the lichen and maybe we can even have Mars go all greenfly on us and then we can spend more on spaceflight in order to be able to flee the galaxy consuming super-lichen

Re:Mars

[Greg Hullender]

On Earth, the Oxygen Cycle is about a million years. Seed Mars with plants, add water, and wait a million years. Presto! Instant oxygen atmosphere.

Of course, advanced technology might cut that to as little as ten-thousand years . . .

--Greg (Why I lost interest in terraforming)

Re:Mars

[JerryLove]

But what will you end up with?

Mars has no magnetosphere, and plants are not going to add one. Radiation will still hit hard, and air will still be stripped away by the solar winds.

Mars has little air, and plants don't generally create new air (they pull carbon from existing air), so it will still be airless.

Given the above, it will also still be freezing (a problem plants will have on Mars that ironically is less of an issue in space, where vacuum is an excellent insulator).

So how "terraformed" will it be? Though it would be cool to have something living there, even if it's not us.

Re:Mars

[sznupi]

if we can confirm there is no existing life on Mars

This one will be hard, Mars is probably too borderline with is invorement to say with high certainity, even if "we haven't found anything yet"

Also, I'm not sure if dumping waste would be productive...yes, some life will hang on; but the resulting biosphere won't be very useful to us.

Re:Mars

[ultranova]

Make the planet into a giant industrial factory where raw pollutants are just dumped out the window. Anything capable of living in that environment would have to thrive on said wastes.

That doesn't make sense. You'd need to lift the products out of Mars's gravity well to get them to Earth - I assume that you didn't mean people to live in the toxic dump planet. If you have that kind of technology, you'd be much better off building your industrial base on asteroids; not only do they have negligible gravity well, but several of them are actually composed of almost pure metals.

Planets are too valuable to waste as toxic dumps, and space-based industry can deliver anywhere with the speed of a shooting star ;).

Re:Mars

[inviolet]

Obviously there are a multitude of inhibitors to such growth but, if we can confirm there is no existing life on Mars there is nothing preventing us from launching a giant rocket to Mars fill with a good cocktail of microbes, algeas, etc and seed bombing the piss outta the planet and letting natural selection establish an ecosystem. I argue the opposite. Make the planet into a giant industrial factory where raw pollutants are just dumped out the window. Anything capable of living in that environment would have to thrive on said wastes.

Why convert Mars into a meat-friendly environment? We already have one of those, and given similar engineering effort, we could turn Venus back into a second. Mars, by contrast, is ALREADY a very nice environment for silicon-based life -- by which I mean AI robots and so forth.

I consider AI robots to be the future of intelligence, which we are blessed/fated/doomed to create. They will absolutely ADORE the cold no-oxygen environment, and the low light conditions are fine for fission-/fusion-/other-powered critters as they will be. So don't mess Mars up, because they can't happily live here on Earth.

Re:Mars

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Pardon the Star Trek analogy here, but wouldn't that be like flinging water balloons into a dry riverbed?

Re:Mars

[mrchaotica]

(including, the shuttle was a bad idea)

What, we hadn't figured that out yet by the time ISS construction started?

It's not open space...

[Lumpy]

It's near earth orbit. INSIDE the magnetosphere which removes a huge amount of radiation from the equation.

Big difference there.

Re:It's not open space...

[RavenChild]

Exactly.

Mars (along with Venus) do not have a magnetosphere in the same way Earth does. They have ionospheres that operate in similar fashion but the magnetic field only deflects a bit of the solar wind.

Re:It's not open space...

[Remus Shepherd]

Not that big a difference, and not in the way you think.

The magnetosphere does nothing about UV radiation, which is the biggest short-term threat from the sun to living things. If you're above the ozone layer, you're getting almost full-strength illumination in UV.

And although the Earth's magnetosphere diverts a lot of the solar wind, it does it in such a way that many high energy particles are trapped in the Van Allen belts, creating regions of near-Earth orbit that have much more particle radiation than the heliosphere. The solar wind has particles up to 100 eV; the inner Van Allen, which the ISS passes through, has energies up to 100 MeV.

So no, it's not 'open space'. It's near Earth orbit, which in some respects is worse than deep space.

Either way, it's a brutal test of endurance for any living thing.

Venus

[MonsterTrimble]

I don't understand what the obsession with going to Mars is. Frankly I think Venus is where we should target our efforts. It has an atmosphere (albeit hazardous to human life) and is about 20% closer to us then Mars. Granted, Venus' atmosphere is about 97% CO2 but I would think that it would be a lot easier to bioengineer something which would survive and thrive in the Venutian atmosphere while changing the CO2 to Oxygen.

Re:Venus

[MachDelta]

Why go to venus when we can simply terraform earth to have a venus-like atmosphere? We're already well on our way! Mars is a much better place to escape to... I mean, investigate.

Re:Venus

[TheDarkMinstrel]

Men are running the program - we just want to go home! We're from Mars, ya know?

And now, thanks to the ISS, we'll have both topping for our pizza and athlete's foot when we get there.

Re:Venus

[khallow]

I don't understand what the obsession with going to Mars is.

Mars has ground. It's really that simple. Look at all of the things on Earth either built on the ground or made of stuff obtained from the ground. In comparison, there is nothing permanently in the sky on Earth. That situation would have to be reversed on Venus. You'd have to make almost everything out of the Venus atmosphere (that yields carbon, oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen). Maybe you could run some sort of quick mining trips on the surface using balloons or harvest dust blown from the surface (it should be able to reach the 1 atmosphere platform). That might get you other materials like silicon, aluminum, and a bit of iron. Anything you can't get locally, you need to bring from elsewhere.

Don't get me wrong, I used to work for the only organization I know of (JP Aerospace) that has ever seriously proposed a permanent structure in the sky. Their "Dark Sky Station", which floats around 100 km high (at the very limits of the buoyant part of our atmosphere), is intended as a waystation for Airship to Orbit. If NASA did suddenly propose to colonize Venus, JP Aerospace would be well positioned to take advantage of that impulse.

But it's a very hard problem that probably won't be solved by the time Mars is colonized. I imagine Ceres, which has no atmosphere at all and a very weak 0.03 G gravity, would be colonized before Venus.

Re:Venus

[Anonymous Coward]

There are already organisms that are adapted to this kind of extreme; they are right here on earth.

Take for instance, the chemotrophic marine organisms near deep-sea trenches and vents. Specifically, the sulfur reducing varieties.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfate-reducing_bacteria

The hard part is getting them to stay afloat in the lighter part of the atmosphere, in or above the sulfuric acid haze, where the temperature and pressure are more conducive to their habitation.

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/V/Venusatmos.html

If you couple this with some chemo-lithotropes, like purple sulfur bacteria, (or organisms engineered to use this pathway), then a stable sulfur cycle could be initiated in the upper venusian atmosphere.

What would likely work best, would be to collect atmospheric bacteria from earths upper atmosphere (Yes, germs do live up there. http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/ESD-air-bacteria.html), and perform genetic augmentation on them to introduce the required traits for venusian habitation.

Once you have carbon fixing organisms floating freely in the atmosphere, you can introduce other organisms that produce heat-stable precipitates, that live by ingesting the former.

Such precipitates might be carbon nanotubes, which would be stable in the venusian atmosphere below the sulfur haze zone, which would be low enough in the atmosphere before being rarified back into carbon dioxide that it could effectively put a pinhole in venus's runaway greenhouse effect, and as the surface temperature slowly falls, might allow carbon "snow" to deposit over time.

It would take geological time for this to happen, but if you could retard the greenhouse effect sufficiently, it would eventually happen.

Re:Venus

[Fred_A]

I don't think there's much point to trying to deal with Venus as it is, so the excess atmosphere has got to go.

The solution is obvious, the atmosphere that is in excess on Venus should be moved to Mars.
Then both problems are elegantly solved at once.

I'll leave the trivial implementation details to you.

shameless plug to ISS videos

[giuntag]

ESA just launched a new website for hosting videos - check it out

http://multimedia.esa.int/content/search?SearchText=iss&SearchButton=Go

http://multimedia.esa.int/content/search?SearchText=mars&SearchButton=Go

Surviving exposure is different than living

[holmstar]

This experiment just shows that the lichen was able to survive long term exposure to space. It doesn't say anything about growth, which is what you would need in order to do any sort of terraforming. It would be nice if they would give a bit more detail on the findings.

Meanwhile...

[Anonymous Coward]

Obama cancelled NASA.

Slow rotation of Venus

[sznupi]

Venus rotates on the order of "once per year". WHile this doesn't mean much with its current thick atmosphere, it's really, really not conductive to Earth-like enviroments. Youd would get variations between the harshest Antarctic night and Sahara heat with separation of 100 days between them. The atmosphere would freeze solid on the night side, with day side dominated by evaporation and completelly dry.

Re:Space Transportation System Orbital Vehicle Man

[holmstar]

Um... sorry to burst your bubble but nothing boils at absolute zero. And the ambient temperature of space is pretty warm, actually. (in terms of the temperature of the sparse distribution of particles out there)

The reason you would freeze in space (besides boiling, which is an endothermic process) is because you radiate energy via infrared light faster than you acquire it via bumping into hot space particles.