Moon Microbes - Weren't

There was a nagging mystery surrounding the Apollo 12 mission. One that has take nearly 40 years to unravel. From the Yahoo News article sent in by Tim Sayell:

• On Nov. 19, 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean made a precision landing on the lunar surface in (in the area called) the Ocean of Storms. Their touchdown point was a mere 535 feet from the Surveyor 3 lander -- and an easy stroll to the hardware that had soft-landed on the lunar terrain years before, on April 20, 1967

Their reason for visiting the probe? To retrieve and return to Earth the camera that was installed on the craft. It was packed in a sterile container and was not removed until it arrived at NASA's clean room. Examining the camera, NASA scientists found a small colony of common bacteria -- Streptococcus Mitis. Now we are not talking about a huge amount but at most 100 of the microbes, which appeared to have survived launch, the harsh vacuum of space, three years of exposure to the moon's radiation environment, the lunar deep-freeze at an average temperature of minus 253 degrees Celsius, not to mention no access to nutrients, water or an energy source.

Though scientists agree that this claim was ridiculous, the press and later the internet continued to champion the claim that microbes had survived. The truth however was far less romantic. Even though the clean room examiners claimed no contamination, examination of procedures and interviews proved different.

From the article:

• The research team writes of the way the Surveyor 3 camera team studied the equipment here on Earth. Or put more delicately, "The general scene does not lend a lot of confidence in the proposition. For example, (after studying documents and 16mm film of the period researchers found that) participants studying the camera were found to be wearing short-sleeve scrubs, thus arms were exposed. Also, the scrub shirt tails were higher than the flow bench level … and would act as a bellows for particulates from inside the shirt..... All in all, the likelihood that contamination occurred during sampling of the Surveyor 3 camera was shown to be very real.

Read the complete article here

Scientists Melt Million-year-old Ice In Search Of Ancient Microbes

From Sciencedaily.com

Researchers from the University of Delaware and the University of California at Riverside have thawed ice estimated to be at least a million years old from above Lake Vostok, an ancient lake that lies hidden more than two miles beneath the frozen surface of Antarctica. The scientists will now examine the eons-old water for microorganisms, and try to figure out how they survived the ages in total darkness, in freezing cold and without food and energy from the sun. segments of ice were cut from an 11,866-foot ice core, 656 feet above the surface of Lake Vostok. This ice was once water in lake Vostok itself and froze to the bottom of the existing Antarctic ice sheet. No samples have been taken directly from lake Vostok as of yet due to fears of contaminating the area. Since the lake has not had direct contact with the surface world for at least 15 million years, this would be a contamination of one of the most pristine environments on Earth.

In NASA’s Sterile Areas, Plenty of Robust Bacteria

From the New York Times By WARREN E. LEARY:

Researchers have found a surprising diversity of hardy bacteria in a seemingly unlikely place — the so-called sterile clean rooms where NASA assembles its spacecraft and prepares them for launching. Samples of air and surfaces in the clean rooms at three National Aeronautics and Space Administration centers revealed surprising numbers and types of robust bacteria that appear to resist normal sterilization procedures, according to a newly published study. The findings are significant, the researchers report, because they can help reduce the chances of stowaway microbes contaminating planets and other bodies visited by the spacecraft and confounding efforts to discover new life elsewhere. Identifying and cataloging what microbes might survive sterilization is important in interpreting results of sampling missions to other planets, scientists said. If similar microbes turn up in alien samples, researchers could disregard the results as contamination and not evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Thanks to Xnewsman for the post

Scientist says: NASA found life on Mars - and killed it

Two NASA space probes that visited Mars 30 years ago may have found alien microbes on the Red Planet and inadvertently killed them, a scientist is theorizing.

The Viking space probes of 1976-77 were looking for the wrong kind of life, so they didn't recognize it, a geology professor at Washington State University said.

In the 1970s, the Viking mission found no signs of life.

But it was looking for Earth-like life, in which salt water is the internal liquid of living cells.

Given the cold dry conditions of Mars, life could have evolved on Mars with the key internal fluid consisting of a mix of water and hydrogen peroxide.

Antarctic Microbes Handle Mars-Like Conditions

Lab experiments with primitive microbes taken from an Antarctic lake have shown that the hardy single-celled organisms can tolerate at least the warmest of the frigid temperatures found on Mars. The findings provide more evidence for the ideas that liquid found beneath Mars’ surface could harbor microbial life and that life could exist elsewhere in the solar system and galaxy, which is generally incredibly cold.