Scientists Find Traces of Sea Plankton On ISS Surface

schwit1 sends this report from the ITAR-TASS News Agency: An experiment of taking samples from illuminators and the ISS surface has brought unique results, as scientists had found traces of sea plankton there, the chief of an orbital mission on Russia's ISS segment told reporters. Results of the scope of scientific experiments which had been conducted for a quite long time were summed up in the previous year, confirming that some organisms can live on the surface of the International Space Station for years amid factors of a space flight, such as zero gravity, temperature conditions and hard cosmic radiation. Several surveys proved that these organisms can even develop. He noted that it was not quite clear how these microscopic particles could have appeared on the surface of the space station.

Comments

This actually makes perfect sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

This doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Many forms of sea plankton are microscopically small. They can easily become trapped within evaporated water droplets. And the ISS isn't really in the dead of space; it's still within the ionosphere, which itself consists partially of water vapor.

So it makes perfect sense that sea plankton would end up trapped within water that evaporated from the surface of the various bodies of water on earth, and then made its way up to the upper reaches of the ionosphere, where the ISS passed through it, causing the plankton to be deposited upon the ISS.

It's all very reasonable.

Re:This actually makes perfect sense.

[wkk2]

If plankton was taken to the ISS via an updraft and it's viable (survived the delta V of impact). It would seem likely that impacts with passing objects that are above escape velocity could also occur. If that's true, plankton might be found all over the solar system.

Re:This actually makes perfect sense.

[Anubis IV]

Are you suggesting that a freak occurrence like a sea breeze may be occurring at a coastal location like Cape Canaveral, Florida? And that it may have even reached as far inland as the VAB, which is where the ISS capsule would have been loaded into the shuttle's cargo bay? And that the VAB, which has the largest doors anywhere in the world so that fully-loaded space vehicles can be carried out on the crawler transporter in one piece, may have allowed such contaminated air to get inside?

Absurdity and nonsense! Surely they would've planned for something like that!

Which is all to say, I quite agree with you, since it seems like the most obvious time and place that sea life could have been deposited on any of the equipment. After all, they spend days or weeks inside the VAB, which is one of the largest buildings by volume in the world. So large, in fact, that rain clouds have formed inside, and that water has to come from somewhere...such as the nearby ocean water that contains plankton.

Re:This actually makes perfect sense.

[hey!]

Except water vapor is the gaseous form of water; the plankton would have to be transported on individual molecules of water to reach the ionosphere.

If plankton were transportable in microscopic *droplets* in the troposphere as you suggest, a more plausible explanation is that the equipment was contaminated -- both the station itself and the gear used to test it.

Re:This actually makes perfect sense.

[evilviper]

If that's true, plankton might be found all over the solar system.

"My God! It's full of plankton!"

They may be the "dark matter" we've been searching for.

Re:This actually makes perfect sense.

[trout007]

Actually nothing is loaded into the payload bay in the VAB. That is just where the stack was built up. The ISS payload were installed in the Payload Changeout Room (PCR) on the Rotating Service Structure (RSS) while the shuttle is actually on the Pad. This allows a later integration for the payloads and allows access to them late in the process.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pa...

It came from Bikini Bottom

[Anonymous Coward]

Krabs must have caught him trying to steal the Krabby Patty formula again.

Re:But is it really plankton?

[frovingslosh]

Of course it is really plankton. The real issue is is it Sea Plankton as claimed. Or are our oceans full of Space Plankton?

Shocked I tell you...shocked!

[djupedal]

Terrestrial materials found on object made of terrestrial materials.

What's next... Celestial whales

[Zondar]

licking the hull of the ISS for nutrition?

not hard cosmic radiation

[slew]

AFAIK, the ISS is still inside the van allen belt which means it isn't even subject to medium-level of cosmic radiation (experienced by the Apollo missions), yet alone hard cosmic interstellar radiation (when you get out into Voyager distances)...

Re:not hard cosmic radiation

[slew]

Yes and no-- Depends on what the ISS's orbit is. If it has a circumpolar orbit, (crosses the polar region), then it will pass through the magnetic field lines that funnel cosmic particles into the atmosphere that cause the northern lights. EG-- it would get beamed pretty intensely with concentrated cosmic particles.

If it does not have that kind of orbit, and instead stays around the equator, then no so much. Mostly radiation free, compared to outside the magnetosphere.

ISS orbit track here... Quite equatorial...

What we need to do, is send a lander to the moon loaded with some microbial and planktonic colonies, where it can get beamed by high intensity, raw solar wind radiation, (And more importantly, where we can keep close tabs on it easily) and measure how the colonies do over time.

Accidentally did that back in '67 with Surveyor 3...

The 50-100 organisms survived launch, space vacuum, 3 years of radiation exposure, deep-freeze at an average temperature of only 20 degrees above absolute zero, and no nutrient, water or energy source. (The United States landed 5 Surveyors on the Moon; Surveyor 3 was the only one of the Surveyors visited by any of the six Apollo landings. No other life forms were found in soil samples retrieved by the Apollo missions or by two Soviet unmanned sampling missions, although amino acids - not necessarily of biological origin - were found in soil retrieved by the Apollo astronauts.)

Re:nuke it in orbit...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

what makes you so sure it is of terrestrial origins?

Unless this is Star Trek, where the entire biodiversity of the galaxy can be accounted for by face paint and is sexually interoperable with starfleet captains, we can make an overwhelmingly likely inference based on the chemistry. If its DNA and assorted important chemistry closely matches a terrestrial species it is very likely to be from around here.

Re:But is it really plankton?

[Tuidjy]

Let see.

Did viable Space Plankton drift from outer space to the ISS as it was orbiting Earth, and just happened to be DNA-identical to the one that has been living (and maybe evolving) in Earth's seas?

Or was Sea Plankton carried by the wind to the hold of the vehicle carrying these components up from cape Canaveral?

Oh, my... so hard to decide which is more likely.

Re:But is it really plankton?

[JoeMerchant]

Well, the cargo ship is one possibility, but when you consider the scale of the oceans and just how close the ISS is to them: if the Pacific Ocean were a sheet of Letter sized paper, the ISS would be zipping along 1/4" above it, and the ISS has been skimming along near the Earth's surface like this for years and years.

Now, think about hurricanes, typhoons, winter storms, and everything else that violently churns the ocean surface - aerosolizing some tiny fraction of it, but still including billions upon billions of plankton that go for a flight every year. Most fall back into the ocean, but some inevitably fly quite high....

What would be amazing to me is if these sea-launched plankton could actually hitch a ride on the passing ISS without getting lethally damaged in the transition. I suppose that on their scale, hitting a wall moving hundreds of miles per hour might not be as disruptive as it is for larger, multicellular organisms.