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.

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.

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

[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).

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...

[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.