Posted on by Ryan Anderson

Ice Caves Possible on Mars

The circular black features in this 2007 figure are caves formed by the collapse of lava tubes on Mars. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/USGS

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New results published in the journal Icarus suggest that caves on Mars may provide future astronauts with more than just shelter. In many locations, even far from the poles, the caves may actually trap water ice.

Ice caves are made of rock, but they contain ice year-round. (Not to be confused with glacier caves, which are caves made of ice!) Ice caves can be found on the Earth even where surface temperatures are above freezing for months at a time. This happens because cold winter air sinks into the cave and is trapped, but during the summer, the circulation in the cave shuts off: it is full of dense cold air so the warm air outside can’t get in.

Now, in a study led by Kaj Williams of NASA Ames, scientists have used simulations of the global climate and assumptions about the thermal properties of the surface to figure out where on Mars similar cold-trapping might occur. Their results show that a significant portion of the martian surface has the right conditions for ice to accumulate in caves.

Even more tantalizing, the huge volcanic provinces of Tharsis and Elysium look to be particularly good at accumulating ice. This is important because caves formed by collapsing lava tubes have been seen on the flanks of these volcanoes. Lava tube caves on Earth tend to have limited air circulation, making them good candidates for ice accumulation.

Astronauts on the surface of Mars will likely need to take cover underground to avoid the harsh radiation environment of the surface. Natural caves such as lava tubes have been suggested as ideal ready-made shelters for astronauts, and they are only looking better. Not only could ice caves provide water as a resource, the ice could preserve valuable records of past climate cycles, and the caves may be important habitats for past or present martian life.

Williams and his team plan to continue refining their models, particularly focusing on the Tharsis and Elysium regions, using higher-resolution atmospheric models and more  precise geologic data to pinpoint areas that are best for cave-ice formation.

Ice formations in a terrestrial ice cave in Montenegro. © copyright by Jack Brauer.
Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Alien Life on Titan? Hang on Just a Minute…

This artist concept shows a mirror-smooth lake on the surface of the smoggy moon Titan. Image credit: NASA/JPL

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Two papers released last week detailing oddities found on Titan have blown the top off the ‘jumping to conclusions’ meter, and following media reports of NASA finding alien life on Saturn’s hazy moon, scientists are now trying to put a little reality back into the news. “Everyone: Calm down!” said Cassini imaging team leader Carolyn Porco on Twitter over the weekend. “It is by NO means certain that microbes are eating hydrogen on Titan. Non-bio explanations are still possible.” Porco also put out a statement on Monday saying such reports were “the unfortunate result of a knee-jerk rush to sensationalize an exciting but rather complex, nuanced and emotionally-charged issue.”

Astrobiologist Chris McKay told Universe Today that life on Titan is “certainly the most exciting, but it’s not the simplest explanation for all the data we’re seeing.”

McKay suggests everyone needs to take the Occam’s Razor approach, where the simplest theory that fits the facts of a problem is the one that should be selected.

The two papers suggest that hydrogen and acetylene are being depleted at the surface of Titan. The first paper by Darrell Strobel shows hydrogen molecules flowing down through Titan’s atmosphere and disappearing at the surface. This is a disparity between the hydrogen densities that flow down to the surface at a rate of about 10,000 trillion trillion hydrogen molecules per second, but none showing up at the surface.

“It’s as if you have a hose and you’re squirting hydrogen onto the ground, but it’s disappearing,” Strobel said. “I didn’t expect this result, because molecular hydrogen is extremely chemically inert in the atmosphere, very light and buoyant. It should ‘float’ to the top of the atmosphere and escape.”

The other paper (link not yet available) led by Roger Clark, a Cassini team scientist, maps hydrocarbons on Titan’s surface and finds a surprising lack of acetylene. Models of Titan’s upper atmosphere suggest a high level of acetylene in Titan’s lakes, as high as 1 percent by volume. But this study, using the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) aboard Cassini, found very little acetylene on Titan’s surface.

Of course, one explanation for both discoveries is that something on Titan is consuming the hydrogen and acetylene.

Even though both findings are important, McKay feels the crux of any possible life on Titan hinges on verifying Strobel’s discovery about the lack of hydrogen.

“To me, the whole thing hovers on this determination of whether there is this flux of hydrogen is real,” McKay said via phone. “The acetylene has been missing and the ethane has been missing, but that certainly doesn’t generate a lot of excitement, because how much is supposed to be there depends on how much is being made. There are a lot of uncertainties.”

McKay stressed both results are still preliminary and the hydrogen loss in particular is the result of a computer calculation, and not a direct measurement. “It is the result of a computer simulation designed to fit measurements of the hydrogen concentration in the lower and upper atmosphere in a self-consistent way,” he said in a statement he put out over the weekend. “It is not presently clear from Strobel’s results how dependent his conclusion of a hydrogen flux into the surface is on the way the computer simulation is constructed or on how accurately it simulates the Titan chemistry.”

However, the findings are interesting for astrobiology, and would require the actual existence of methane-based life, a theory McKay himself proposed five years ago, which he described today as an “odd idea.”

In 2005, McKay and Heather Smith (McKay and Smith, 2005) suggested that methane-based life (rather than water-based) called methanogens on Titan could consume hydrogen, acetylene, and ethane. The key conclusion of that paper was “The results of the recent Huygens probe could indicate the presence of such life by anomalous depletions of acetylene and ethane as well as hydrogen at the surface.”

Even though the two new papers seem to show evidence for all three of these on Titan, McKay said this is a still a long way from “evidence of life”. However, it is extremely interesting.

But what does McKay really think?

“Unfortunately, if I was betting, the most likely explanation is that Darrel’s (Strobel) results are wrong and that further analysis will show there is another explanation for the data he is trying to fit, besides the strong flux of hydrogen into the surface. I would be very happy if we did confirm all that data, but we do have to take it in steps.”

McKay provided four possibilities for the recently reported findings, listed in order of their likely reality:

1. The determination that there is a strong flux of hydrogen into the surface is mistaken. “It will be interesting to see if other researchers, in trying to duplicate Strobel’s results, reach the same conclusion,” McKay said.

2. There is a physical process that is transporting H2 from the upper atmosphere into the lower atmosphere. One possibility is adsorption onto the solid organic atmospheric haze particles which eventually fall to the ground. However this would be a flux of H2, and not a net loss of H2.

3. If the loss of hydrogen at the surface is correct, the non-biological explanation requires that there be some sort of surface catalyst, presently unknown, that can mediate the hydrogenation reaction at 95 K, the temperature of the Titan surface. “That would be quite interesting and a startling find although not as startling as the presence of life,” McKay said.

4. The depletion of hydrogen, acetylene, and ethane, is due to a new type of liquid-methane based life form as predicted (Benner et al. 2004, McKay and Smith 2005, and Schulze-Makuch and Grinspoon 2005 (Astrobiology, vol. 5, no. 4., p. 560-567.).

McKay said if further analysis shows that a strong flux of hydrogen into the surface really is happening, “then my first two explanations are no longer options and we are then left with two really quite remarkable alternatives, either there is some mysterious metalysis going on, which at 95 k is really hard to imagine, and would have enormous implications for things like chemical engineering. And the second alternative is that there is life, which is even more amazing.”

“So to make process on this,” McKay continued, “we have to confirm Darrel’s result that there is hydrogen being fluxed onto the surface of Titan, that is really way unexpected, and unfortunately, it constitutes extraordinary claims that need extraordinary evidence. Darrel’s paper is just a first step in that.”

What does McKay think about the rash of media reports claiming life on Titan?

“Well, I think it reflects our human fascination and desire to find life out there,” he said. “We want it to be true. When we’re given a set of facts, if they are consistent with biology we jump to that explanation first. The most biologically interesting explanation is the first one we look to. We ought to give that a name — something like ‘Carl Sagan’s Razor’ as opposed to ‘Occam’s Razor,’ which would say that ‘The most exciting explanation is assumed to be true until it is proven false.'”

You can read all of McKay’s written response on the CICLOPS website, which Porco said will be “the first installment in a new feature on the CICLOPS website, called ‘Making Sense of the News’, where from time to time, scientists, both involved in Cassini and not, will be invited to comment on new developments that bear on the exploration of the solar system and the study of planetary systems, including our own.”

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Are We Contaminating Mars?

A new image from the HiRISE camera on MRO showing mounds of south polar layered deposits. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

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With Mars seemingly the destination of choice in NASA’s future, researchers are taking a look at what kinds of things we want to bring with us when we go to Mars. But also, just as important is what we don’t want to take with us. A new study by the University of Central Florida reveals that bacteria common to spacecraft may be able to survive the harsh environment of Mars long enough to inadvertently contaminate the Red Planet with terrestrial life. So, if we do find life on Mars, the question might be: is it them, or is it us?

The research team replicated Mars-like conditions, such as a very dry environment, low barometric pressure, cold temperatures and intense UV radiation. They exposed one of our favorite bacteria, E. coli (Escherichia coli) – which is a potential spacecraft contaminant– to these conditions for a week, and found it likely would survive but not grow on the surface of Mars if it were shielded from UV irradiation, such as in nooks and crannies in a spacecraft, or even if it was covered by thin layers of dust.

“If long-term microbial survival is possible on Mars, then past and future explorations of Mars may provide the microbial inoculum (biological materials) for seeding Mars with terrestrial life,” said the researchers. “Thus, a diversity of microbial species should be studied to characterize their potential for long term survival on Mars.”

Even though NASA and other space agencies do sterilize spacecraft in an effort to reduce the chance of contamination to other bodies in our solar system, recent studies have shown that microbial species are likely still hitching a ride. And in what might be a more-harm-than-good scenario, the sterile nature of spacecraft assembly facilities ensures that only the most resilient species survive, including acinetobacter, bacillus, escherichia, staphylococcus and streptococcus. So we’re likely sending the worst of the worst kinds of bacteria, at least by human standards.

This research was published in the April 2010 issue of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Source: American Society for Microbiology

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Life on Titan Could Be Smelly and Explosive

Artist concept of Methane-Ethane lakes on Titan (Credit: Copyright 2008 Karl Kofoed). Click for larger version.

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Could there be life on Titan? If so, one astrobiologist says humans probably couldn’t be in the same room with a Titanian and live to tell about it. “Hollywood would have problems with these aliens” said Dr. William Bains. “Beam one onto the Starship Enterprise and it would boil and then burst into flames, and the fumes would kill everyone in range. Even a tiny whiff of its breath would smell unbelievably horrible. But I think it is all the more interesting for that reason. Wouldn’t it be sad if the most alien things we found in the galaxy were just like us, but blue and with tails?”

While giving an obvious nod to the recent movie “Avatar,” Bains’ research provides insight to the difficulties we might encounter – beyond cultural – if we ever meet up with alien life. There could be unintended harmful consequences for one species, or both.

Bains is working to find out just how extreme the chemistry of life can be. Life on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, represents one of the more bizarre scenarios being studied. While images sent back by the Cassini/Huygens mission might make Titan look Earth-like and maybe even inviting, it has a thick atmosphere of frozen, orange smog. At ten times our distance from the Sun, it is a frigid place, with a surface temperature of -180 degrees Celsius. Water is permanently frozen into ice and the only liquid available is liquid methane and ethane.

So instead of water based-life (like us), life on Titan would likely be based on methane.

“Life needs a liquid; even the driest desert plant on Earth needs water for its metabolism to work. So, if life were to exist on Titan, it must have blood based on liquid methane, not water. That means its whole chemistry is radically different. The molecules must be made of a wider variety of elements than we use, but put together in smaller molecules. It would also be much more chemically reactive,” said Bains.

Additionally, Bains said a metabolism running in liquid methane would have to be built of smaller molecules than terrestrial biochemistry.

“Terrestrial life uses about 700 molecules, but to find the right 700 there is reason to suppose that you need to be able to make 10 million or more,” Bains said. “The issue is not how many molecules you can make, but whether you can make the collection you need to assemble a metabolism.”

Bains said doing such assembling is like trying to find bits of wood in a lumber-yard to make a table.

“In theory you only need 5,” he said. “But you may have a lumber-yard full of offcuts and still not find exactly the right five that fit together. So you need the potential to make many more molecules than you actually need. Thus the 6-atom chemicals on Titan would have to include much more diverse bond types and probably more diverse elements, including sulphur and phosphorus in much more diverse and (to us) unstable forms, and other elements such as silicon.”

Energy is another factor that would affect the type of life that could evolve on Titan. With Sunlight a tenth of a percent as intense on Titan’s surface as on the surface of Earth, energy is likely to be in short supply.

“Rapid movement or growth needs a lot of energy, so slow-growing, lichen-like organisms are possible in theory, but velociraptors are pretty much ruled out,” said Bains.

Whatever life may be on Titan, at least we know there won’t be a Jurassic Park.

Bains, whose research is carried out through Rufus Scientific in Cambridge, UK, and MIT in the USA, is presenting his research at the National Astronomy Meeting in Glasgow, Scotland on April 13, 2010.

Source: RAS NAM

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

How Common are Solar Systems Like Ours?

Solar system montage. Credit: NASA

On the whole, we’d like to think we’re special, but we also hope we aren’t alone in the Universe. Astronomers have been trying to figure out just how common solar systems like ours are across the cosmos, and during one moment of epiphany one scientist figured out how to make the calculations. It took a worldwide collaboration of astronomers to do the work, but they concluded that about 10 – 15 percent of stars in the universe host systems of planets like our own, with several gas giant planets in the outer part of the solar system.

“Now we know our place in the universe,” said Ohio State University astronomer Scott Gaudi. “Solar systems like our own are not rare, but we’re not in the majority, either.”

The find comes from a collaboration headquartered at Ohio State called the Microlensing Follow-Up Network (MicroFUN), which searches the sky for extrasolar planets.

MicroFUN astronomers use gravitational microlensing — which occurs when one star happens to cross in front of another as seen from Earth. The nearer star magnifies the light from the more distant star like a lens. If planets are orbiting the lens star, they boost the magnification briefly as they pass by.

During his talk at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, DC today, Gaudi said, “Planetary microlensing basically is looking for planets you can’t see around stars you can’t see.”

This method is especially good at detecting giant planets in the outer reaches of solar systems — planets analogous to our own Jupiter.

This latest MicroFUN result is the culmination of 10 years’ work — and one sudden epiphany, explained Gaudi and Andrew Gould, professor of astronomy at Ohio State.

Ten years ago, Gaudi wrote his doctoral thesis on a method for calculating the likelihood that extrasolar planets exist. At the time, he concluded that less than 45 percent of stars could harbor a configuration similar to our own solar system.

Then, in December of 2009, Gould was examining a newly discovered planet with Cheongho Han of the Institute for Astrophysics at Chungbuk National University in Korea. The two were reviewing the range of properties among extrasolar planets discovered so far, when Gould saw a pattern.

“Basically, I realized that the answer was in Scott’s thesis from 10 years ago,” Gould said. “Using the last four years of MicroFUN data, we could add a few robust assumptions to his calculations, and we could now say how common planet systems are in the universe.”

The find boils down to a statistical analysis: in the last four years, the MicroFUN survey has discovered only one solar system like our own — a system with two gas giants resembling Jupiter and Saturn, which astronomers discovered in 2006 and reported in the journal Science in 2008.

“We’ve only found this one system, and we should have found about eight by now — if every star had a solar system like Earth’s,” Gaudi said.

The slow rate of discovery makes sense if only a small number of systems — around 10 percent — are like ours, they determined.

“While it is true that this initial determination is based on just one solar system and our final number could change a lot, this study shows that we can begin to make this measurement with the experiments we are doing today,” Gaudi added.

As to the possibility of life as we know it existing elsewhere in the universe, scientists will now be able to make a rough guess based on how many solar systems are like our own.

Our solar system may be a minority, but Gould said that the outcome of the study is actually positive.

“With billions of stars out there, even narrowing the odds to 10 percent leaves a few hundred million systems that might be like ours,” he said.

At the AAS conference today, Gaudi was awarded the Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy.

Source: AAS, EurekAlert

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Signs of Life Detected on the Moon?

Image from the Moon Impact Probe of the lunar surface. Credit: ISRO

A website based in India has reported researchers with the Chandrayaan-1 mission may have found “signs of life in some form or the other on the Moon.” DNAIndia.com quoted Surendra Pal, associate director of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Satellite Centre as saying that Chandrayaan-1 picked up signatures of organic matter on parts of the Moon’s surface. “The findings are being analyzed and scrutinized for validation by ISRO scientists and peer reviewers,” Pal said.

Sources in India say Chandrayaan project director M. Annadurai later commented that the story was broken very prematurely. However, he did not dismiss the idea.

At a press conference Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union fall conference, scientists from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter also hinted at possible organics locked away in the lunar regolith. When asked directly about the Chandrayaan-1 claim of finding life on the Moon, NASA’s chief lunar scientist, Mike Wargo, certainly did not dismiss the idea either but said, “It is an intriguing suggestion, and we are certainly very interested in learning more of their results.”

Chandrayaan-1’s Moon Impact Probe, or MIP impacted the within the Shackleton Crater on the Moon’s south pole on Nov. 14, 2008. An anonymous Chandrayaan-1 scientist said MIP’s mass spectrometer detected chemical signatures of organic matter in the soil kicked up by the impact.

“Certain atomic numbers were observed that indicated the presence of carbon components. This indicates the possibility of the presence of organic matter (on the Moon),” a senior scientist told DNAIndia.

The scientist added the source of the organics could be comets or meteorites which have deposited the matter on the Moon’s surface but the recent discovery by another impact probe — the LCROSS mission — of ice in the polar regions of the Moon also “lend credence to the possibility of organic matter there.”

Undoubtedly, getting from carbon compounds directly to organics is a bit of a stretch, but amino acids have been detected in comets and were also found in pieces of the asteroid 2008 TC3 that landed in Africa over a year ago. Over the millennia, the Moon has been bombarded by comet and asteroid hits.

We’ll keep you posted on any official announcements by ISRO.

Sources: BAUT Forum, DNA India, AGU press conference

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

New Findings On Allen Hills Meteorite Point to Microbial Life

Scientists caused quite a stir in 1996 when they announced a meteorite had been found in Antarctica that might contain evidence for microscopic fossils of Martian bacteria. While subsequent studies of the now famous Allen Hills Meteorite shot down theories that the Mars rock held fossilized alien life, both sides debated the issue and the meteorite is still being studied. Now, Craig Covault in Spaceflightnow.com reports that a new look at ALH84001 provides “evidence that supports the existence of life on the surface of Mars, or in subsurface water pools, early in the planet’s history.” Covault says we can expect a public announcement by NASA Headquarters within a few days.

Research using a more advanced High Resolution Electron Microscopy than was in existence when the initial findings were made 13 years ago has provided the new evidence. Covault reported that the “laboratory sensors are being focused directly on carbonate discs and associated tiny magnetite crystals present inside the meteorite Allen Hills ALH 84001.” The data reveal information that counters a “wide range of opposing theories as to why the finding should not be supported as biological in origin.”

The new findings were reported in the November issue of the respected journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, the journal of the Geochemical and Meteoritic Society. The authors include Kathie Thomas-Keprta, Simon Clement, David McKay (who led the original team), Everett Gibson and Susan Wentworth, all of the Johnson Space Center.

Covault said the new work centers on what is called magnetic bacteria that on Earth, and Mars as well, leave distinctively-shaped remnants in the rock. These features test with a high chemical purity more like a biological feature than geological.

For more details, read the article on Spaceflightnow.com

Exciting! Stay tuned…

Posted on by Nicholos Wethington

Vatican Holds Conference on Extraterrestrial Life

Though it may seem an unlikely location to happen upon a conference on astrobiology, the Vatican recently held a “study week” of over 30 astronomers, biologists, geologists and religious leaders to discuss the question of the existence of extraterrestrials. This follows the statement made last year by the Pope’s chief astronomer, Father Gabriel Funes, that the existence of extraterrestrials does not preclude a belief in God, and that it’s a question to be explored by the Catholic Church. The event, put on by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, took place at the Casina Pio IV on the Vatican grounds from November 6-11.

The conference was meant to focus on the scientific perspective on the subject of the existence of extraterrestrial life, and pulled in perspectives from atheist scientists and Catholic leaders alike. It was split into eight different segments, starting with a topics about life here on Earth such as the origins of life, the Earth’s habitability through time, and the environment and genomes. Then the detection of life elsewhere, search strategies for extrasolar planets, the formation and properties of extrasolar planets was discussed, culminating in the last segment, intelligence elsewhere and ‘shadow life’ – life with a biochemistry completely different than that found on Earth.

Speakers at the event included notable physicist Paul Davies and Jill C. Tarter, the Director of the Center for SETI Research. Numerous astrobiologists and astronomers researching extrasolar planets also were in attendance to give lectures. The whole series of speech abstracts and a list of participants is available in a brochure on the Vatican site, here.

The event was held to mark the International Year of Astronomy, and the participants hope to collect the lectures into a book. Father Gabriel Funes, the chief astronomer of the Vatican, said in an interview to the Vatican paper, Osservatore Romano last year:

“Just like there is an abundance of creatures on earth, there could also be other beings, even intelligent ones, that were created by God. That doesn’t contradict our faith, because we cannot put boundaries to God’s creative freedom. As saint Francis would say, when we consider the earthly creatures to be our “brothers and sisters”, why couldn’t we also talk about a “extraterrestrial brother”? He would still be part of creation.”

Even with the discovery of over 400 exoplanets, the question of extraterrestrial life still remains to be answered in our own Solar System. It is a pertinent question for the religious and non-religious alike. Though it wasn’t answered at this most recent conference, the existence of life outside what we know here on Earth has an equal impact on the findings of science as it does the meaning of religion. This event certainly brought the two under the same roof for what were surely some interesting and fruitful conversations.

Source: Physorg, Pontifical Academy of Sciences

Posted on by Nicholos Wethington

Mars Explorers May Use AI to Become ‘Cyborg Astrobiologists’

Future Mars astronauts. Image Credit: Patrick McGuire

Ever heard of a ‘Cyborg Astrobiologist’? Probably not. But I bet you’ll want to be one after learning that future exploration of Mars (and other planets, for that matter) may employ the use of artificial intelligence integrated into spacesuits to enhance the ability of astronauts in taking scientific data while exploring. The AI assistance could help future astronauts exploring planets to recognize differences in their surroundings as being due to the presence of life. Does this sound like something from 50 years from now? Well, a prototype model has already been tested, and has shown the principle behind this idea to be sound.

University of Chicago geoscientist Patrick McGuire and his team have developed the basic systems needed for such a spacesuit, using mostly off-the shelf technology. The system uses a Hopfield neural network to analyze data taken in by a either a camera phone or a microscope. The AI system employs a ‘novelty detection algorithm’ which analyzes images from either imaging device, and is able to identify features in images that are out of place.

The Hopfield system compares patterns against ones it has already seen, and learns from this process to correctly identify novel patterns that could be of interest. The full prototype spacesuit has a wearable computer that houses the AI system, which uses Bluetooth to receive data from a cell phone camera or is connected to a USB digital microscope.

The system was tested at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in the San Rafael Swell of Utah, which is maintained by the Mars Society. The MDRS is a semi-arid desert with “greenish, grey or light gray mudstone,
limestone, siltstone and sandstone, partially inter-bedded by white sandstone layers”. For the last two weeks of February 2009, two members of McGuire’s team tested the wearable technology, which was able to successfully learn to identify patches of lichen from a background of rock, and identify different color patterns that signified different rock formations.

Another test, conducted in September of 2005 at Rivas Vaciamadrid in Spain, utilized a USB digital microscope to image rocks with lichen on them. As you can see in the image below, the AI system was able to identify as uncommon the spores of the lichen, which are about 1mm in diameter.The Hopfield AI system was able to successfully identify lichen spores imaged by a digital microscope as a novel feature on rock formations in Rivas Vaciamadrid, Spain. Image Credit: Patrick McGuire arXiv:0910.5454

There are still some bugs to be worked out, though, as the system detected cast shadows in rough terrain our low standing Sun as novel features, the researchers wrote in their paper, The Cyborg Astrobiologist: Testing a Novelty-Detection Algorithm on Two Mobile Exploration Systems at Rivas Vaciamadrid in Spain and at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, available on Arxiv. The researchers also tested a head-mounted digital microscope display, but instead opted for a tripod due to the blurriness associated with the head movement of the researcher wearing the suit.

Though it may be a while until there are any Martian astronauts utilizing such a system – let alone Martian astronauts with the title of ‘Cyborg Astrobiologist’ – the combination of the AI with imaging systems could start to prove very useful on future orbital surveyors of Mars. Additionally, these systems could be used to collect and analyze data outside of the visible light spectrum, which could be incredibly useful for both robotic and human explorers.

Source: Physorg, Arxiv

Posted on by Nicholos Wethington

Bacteria Could Survive in Martian Soil

Certain strains of bacteria, including Bacilus Pumilus, may be able to survive on the Martian surface. Image credit: NASA

Multiple missions have been sent to Mars with the hopes of testing the surface of the planet for life – or the conditions that could create life – on the Red Planet. The question of whether life in the form of bacteria (or something even more exotic!) exists on Mars is hotly debated, and still requires a resolute yes or no. Experiments done right here on Earth that simulate the conditions on Mars and their effects on terrestrial bacteria show that it is entirely possible for certain strains of bacteria to weather the harsh environment of Mars.

A team led by Giuseppe Galletta of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Padova simulated the conditions present on Mars, and then introduced several strains of bacteria into the simulator to record their survival rate. The simulator – named LISA (Laboratorio Italiano Simulazione Ambienti) – reproduced surface conditions on Mars, with temperatures ranging from +23 to -80 degrees Celsius (73 to -112 Fahrenheit), a 95% CO2 atmosphere at low pressures of 6 to 9 millibars, and very strong ultraviolet radiation. The results – some of the strains of bacteria were shown to survive up to 28 hours under these conditions, an amazing feat given that there is nowhere on the surface of the Earth where the temperatures get this low or the ultraviolet radiation is as strong as on Mars.

Two of the strains of bacteria tested – Bacillus pumilus and Bacillus Nealsonii – are both commonly used in laboratory tests of extreme environmental factors and their effects on bacteria because of their ability to produce endospores when stressed. Endospores are internal structures of the bacteria that encapsulate the DNA and part of the cytoplasm in a thick wall, to prevent the DNA from being damaged.

Galletta’s team found that the vegetative cells of the bacteria died after only a few minutes, due to the low water content and high UV radiation. The endospores, however, were able to survive between 4 and 28 hours, even when exposed directly to the UV light. The researchers simulated the dusty surface of Mars by blowing volcanic ash or dust of red iron oxide on the samples. When covered with the dust, the samples showed an even higher percentage of survival, meaning that it’s possible for a hardy bacterial strain to survive underneath the surface of the soil for very long periods of time. The deeper underneath the soil an organism is, the more hospitable the conditions become; water content increases, and the UV radiation is absorbed from the soil above.

Given these findings, and all of the rich data that came in last year from the Phoenix lander – especially the discovery of perchlorates –  continuing the search for life on Mars still seems a plausible endeavor.

Though this surely isn’t a confirmation of life on Mars, it shows that even life that isn’t adapted to the conditions of the planet could potentially hold out against the extreme nature of the environment there, and bodes well for the possibility of Martian bacterial life forms. The LISA simulations also indicate the importance of avoiding cross-contamination of bacteria from Earth to Mars on any scientific missions that travel to the planet. In other words, when we finally are able to definitively test for life on our neighboring planet, we don’t want to find out that our Earth bacteria have killed off all the native lifeforms!

Sources: Arxiv papers here and here.