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Curiosity Rover May Have Brought Dozens of Microbes To Mars
bmahersciwriter (2955569) writes "Despite rigorous pre-flight cleaning, swabbing of the Curiosity Rover just prior to liftoff revealed some 377 strains of bacteria. 'In the lab, scientists exposed the microbes to desiccation, UV exposure, cold and pH extremes. Nearly 11% of the 377 strains survived more than one of these severe conditions. Thirty-one per cent of the resistant bacteria did not form tough, protective spore coats; the researchers suspect that they used other biochemical means of protection, such as metabolic changes.' While the risk of contaminating the red planet are unknown, knowing the types of strains that may have survived pre-flight cleaning may help rule out biological 'discoveries' if and when NASA carries out its plans to return a soil sample from Mars."
Mayflower all over again.
It has been speculated that life here on Earth came from space. And there has been speculation that this life may have come from Mars thanks to asteroid impacts ejecting material with enough energy to reach escape velocity, some of this material reaching the Earth in its early primordial history. Well, if this is the case, we're returning the favor.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
...we're screwed
Table-ized A.I.
First properly documented interplanetary flight sent by us, with biological specimens on board ! Pity we didnt measure the effect of zero-g or deep space radiation on these.
Next up, amoebas and molluscs to mars ! With the current pace, maybe in next couple thousand years we'll send rhesus monkeys at some point.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Why isn't anyone proposing a experiment where we send extremophile bacteria we believe can survive on mars and find out if in fact they can survive or perhaps even thrive under the harsh martian conditions. This would have huge implications for our search for extra terrestrial life, it would mean that its very likely mars already harbors life from earth that hitchhiked on a meteorite and even more importantly it would mean that life as we know it, needs goldilocks planet conditions only for so long as it takes to develop the genetic tool-set to deal with extreme environments, from where its than able to go on an colonize planets we currently believe are inhospitable to life as we know it.
Not even living there yet but we already shat everywhere on the carpet !
JPL actually has a highly detailed document on "Policy for Planetary Protection" that details the standards to which a probe must be sanitized to before being sent on its mission. The level of cleanliness depends on the intended mission and target; orbiters have a lesser standard than landers, for example. The policy also takes into account different parts of the spacecraft; the inside of the box containing the CPU and so forth isn't cleaned to as high of a standard as the wheels, experiments and so forth that are directly exposed to the environment. In the case of the Galileo probe, it was deliberately crashed into Jupiter at the end of mission in order to ensure it would never impact Europa, as it had not been cleaned to that high of a standard. Cassini will face a parallel fate, of crashing into Saturn to prevent a collision with Enceladus and/or Titan.
The key part here is that when you are looking for life (or might be looking for life in the near future) you don't want to discover that the life is found is something that you brought from earth yourself, or was brought by another space probe.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Terraforming has begun. With some luck, there were one or two microbes that can do photosynthesis. Plenty of CO2 on Mars.
Yes, it will take a really long time, but we had to start at some point, right? Good job, NASA.
Now Mars is going to be contaminated with MRSA, isn't it? At least our probes aren't handing blankets over to the natives.
angering the god of war is never good.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
The microbes will evolve into petroleum! Launch the American invasion of Mars!! Boots on the ground before the Chinese! Mars belongs to Bushbama!!!!!!!!! Support our motherfucking Troops, motherfuckers!!!!!!
Life found on Mars!
Maybe in a billion years, when the sun has expanded a bit and mars is a bit warmer, gets an atmosphere somehow and honest to god martians are looking at the dead blue world and wondering if it ever harbored life.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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Please tell me we didn't send microbes to the moon, too. Just think of the consequences.
Turns out we are the Great Ancients from a million years ago that came from the cosmos to seed life. Whatever species ends up evolving there will dig into their past with wonder and trepidation to discover who we were. And then they'll find out about Honey Boo Boo. Ah, to be a fly on the wall... :)
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
You call that Terraforming? Hint: You sit right between the orbits of Venus and Mars.
Venus has sulfuric acid clouds. Mars has a surface covered in iron oxide.
3H2SO4 + Fe2O3 -> 3H2O + Fe2(SO4)3; Sulfuric acid + Iron Oxide = Water and Iron Sulfate salt.
That's not "Terraforming", it's a simple riddle any sufficiently advanced species in your situation could solve if they needed a bit more elbow room.
You solve this basic trans-atmospheric endeavor and you can move onto the next step towards solving the Fermi Paradox (but let's leave the Asteroid Belt and Oort Cloud out of this).
I honestly can't fathom know how much more blatant we can be! Look, JPL's Spirit rover is now forever stuck in what?
Iron Sulfate... Hello? McFly?! It's sad, but we have to face the fact that you may not ever be able to take a hint.
Ugh, humans. Can't live with 'em, can't take 'em off the endangered sentience list.
Aren't they worried about sending probes and the like to Europa because of this reason?
But then it got me thinking, wouldn't the immense radiation emitted from Jupiter kill any bacterial organisms?
So if humans ever do populate Mars, they'll face strains of bacteria which even NASA can't kill. Wouldn't this make an argument for not going to such extremes to try to rid such rovers of any and all bacteria?
www.gaiageek.com
'In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians--dead!--slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things--taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many--those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance--our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.'
Well, at least this has saved us from the Heat Ray, the Black Smoke and the Red Weed. The Martians should have invaded back in 1897 when they had a chance.
Taken, not brought. That is all.
There were some (only slightly) successful Soviet Mars landers. They were not sterilized at all.
It was a small step for a bacteria, but a giant leap for bugs.
"Ack-Ack!"
Russian probe "Mars 3" landed in 1972. I really doubt they cared that much about this as now. In 42 years, a lot of things can happen in the bacterial world.
SEED IT!!!!!!!
If native life on Mars is found, they will say: "But it was created here."
"Life finds a way"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
No truer words were ever spoken
"All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again." Though probably the first time it was the last-minute waste dump out from the departing ship . . .
...it will be the descendants of these microbes that kill us. But still, we go. Uuuuu-laaaaaa!
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
If we were going to contaminate the Martians we should do it right and send them blankets laced with smallpox. Hey, it worked before.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It is extremely unlikely that any bugs that made the passage from Earth to Mars on the rover will survive on the surface of Mars and propagate. The perchlorates in the soil are a super oxidizer that will gobble them up. The surface of Mars may be more hostile to life than space.
We should be sending samples there, to try to find one that can thrive. Once we do, spread it liberally over the surface.
The USSR also signed the outer space treaty, and made every effort to sterilize according to their obligations.
This space intentionally left blank
The rovers were contaminated. Ok, but at least it was limited contamination, unlike what would happen if we sent people to mars. We really need to search the planet for life before we send people, the risks are too high otherwise. Risks: 1-Once you contaminate Mars finding life becomes orders of magnitude harder. 2-If you bring something back you might kill us all (we would have no biological defenses). 3-Moral values. Wiping out martian life by dumping our microbes onto them is Evil.
Reminds me of a Sci-Fi story I read years ago.
In it an astronaut discovers life at the Martian poles. Real alien stuff, not sentient, but clearly native Martian. He accidentally contaminates the area with Earth microbes and the Earth stuff immediately starts to out-compete the domestic flora. Without knowing it the astronaut has doomed the Martian life to extinction and he's the last (and first) person to witness native Martian lifeforms. Alive, that is.
I've no idea who wrote it or the name of the piece.
In my opinion, we should be _populating_ planets, not keeping them sterile. We can do worthwhile science, watching low level life forms adapt to martian life.