
New Bacterial Life-Form Discovered in NASA and ESA Spacecraft Clean Rooms - ColinWright
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bacteria-discovered-spacecraft-clean-rooms&WT.mc_id=SA_sharetool_Twitter
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andyjohnson0
I wonder if this article is confusing two different types of clean room.

I can understand why a lander like Phoenix has to be biologically clean,
needing bio-isolation and alcohol-swabbed surfaces, but why is there this
requirement for the Herschel space telescope? It stays in space. Surely the
telescope would just require protection from dust, etc. during assembly in an
environment similar to a chip fab? I'm not too surprised that bacteria could
find their way into such an environment.

Disclosure: Obviously I'm not a rocket scientist.

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vor_
The article's second page answers this:

Scientists go to all this trouble for the purpose of “planetary
protection”—which usually means protecting other planets from contamination by
microbes originating on Earth. Most spacefaring countries have agreed to
follow guidelines from the International Council for Science’s Committee on
Space Research to reduce the chances of their vehicles carrying Earth
organisms to other planets. The clean room procedures also safeguard against
scientists mistaking Earthly microbes as extraterrestrial in origin if they
are discovered on another planet, having caught a ride with a man-made
spacecraft. “The whole idea of collecting information about what kind of bugs
we have in the spacecraft assembly facility is to have baseline information so
that in the future, if you find it on Mars, you have some grounds to rule out
the possibility that it came from Mars,” Vaishampayan says.

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dekhn
120kg of matter is exchanged between Mars and Earth per year, already.

They've just reduced the possibility of contamination by their spacecraft,
compared to natural events.

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Groxx
Citation please (sounds interesting, but yeah), and does it get exchanged at
the speed that this stuff does, or does it take thousands^x years to arrive?

Not that I disagree. Just wondering if there are a few orders of magnitude
that need to be considered.

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raverbashing
Well, it's much, much easier to have stuff from Mars to Earth than the other
way round, because of the following reasons:

1 - Less gravity on Mars -> smaller escape velocity

2 - Mars is in a higher energy level (gravity wise w.r.t the Sun), so Mars to
Earth is "falling down", but you need energy to go from Earth to Mars

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Groxx
1) agreed. there's solid evidence that Mars sends junk to us - not sure about
the other way around.

2) does that matter, since they're in orbit, thus zero/microgravity? You still
need energy to _leave_ an orbit, whether up or down, I don't see how it makes
a difference. There's no friction to speak of to make "down" a direction that
things are predisposed to move in. Over ridiculous time scales sure, but
ridiculous time scales are nothing like human time scales, so we still have
many orders of magnitude difference if we fling stuff at Mars intentionally.

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dhimes
Yes it matters- the Sun is the main provider of gravity for this
consideration.

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Groxx
orbit. gravity is canceled out by orbital velocity, as far as distance-from-
sun is concerned. it costs Mars nothing to stay in orbit, and to go down to a
-100m/s orbit or up to a +100m/s orbit costs the same amount of energy: (mass
of mars) * (100m/s velocity change)

if Mars and the Earth were _not_ orbiting, I would completely agree. drop
something from Mars and it'll land on Earth, and the reverse is not true. but
they're not - drop something on Mars and it's just in Mars' orbit.

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mikeash
Delta-v requirements for transfers in space are generally symmetrical. It
takes the same amount of delta-v to go from Earth's orbit to Mars's orbit, for
example, regardless of direction.

The one thing that changes this equation is aerobraking (or, when dealing with
stuff whose structural integrity isn't important, lithobraking). Because drag
works in one direction, that means that you can take advantage of it when
arriving but not departing. For that reason, for example, it takes more
delta-v to reach a transfer orbit to Mars from Earth than it takes to reach
Earth from a transfer orbit to Mars. Technically that's not true, but when
arriving at Earth, a great deal of delta-v can be provided by the atmosphere
or the ground.

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dhimes
I see that now. Thank you.

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bonestamp2
"The researchers are not sure yet if the bug lives only in clean rooms or
survives elsewhere..."

They think there's a possibility it only lives in clean rooms? Am I missing
something, or does that seem very unlikely?

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jeremyjh
Presumably it did not spring into existence fully-formed in a clean room in
the last hundred years. So, it must be able to live in other conditions but at
population levels that are virtually undetectable.

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unoti
I have a bunch of questions born of my ignorance of microbiology:

Is it possible this organism evolved in the last few decades, with the advent
of clean rooms? Or is it more likely that a few of these are around all the
time, and only multiply extensively in clean rooms? Also, what do they eat or
use for energy to reproduce in such environments? And if they don't really
eat, how do they not die on a long space journey?

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icegreentea
It is possible for it to have evolved in the last few decades, but really
unlikely. The stated figure of less than 5% DNA commonality implies a really
extensive divergence. Given the low energy environment it grows it, the
bacteria likely reproduces at a very slow rate, making the divergence over the
last few decades very unlikely.

That said, its probable that the strains discovered are probably some slight
"modification" from the "wildtype" bacteria.

As for what they eat in a clean room, there are a couple options. A) They
might be driven mostly by alcohol metabolism and feeding off residual alcohol
from the containimation. Or might likely B) they're feeding off the skin
flakes coming off the "unshielded" areas of the workers, and that they are
just very very slow.

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tokenadult
_The stated figure of less than 5% DNA commonality implies a really extensive
divergence._

Your reasoning is correct, but in case you'd like to edit, I'll point out that
the article wrote, "The scientists determined that T. phoenicis shares less
than 95 percent of its genetic sequence with its closest bacterial relative."
The figures "less than 95 percent" and "less than 5%" imply very different
degrees of similarity.

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ryanmarsh
"New" or "previously undiscovered"?

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Aardwolf
Well, there probably already is life on Mars thanks to us now :)

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riggins
for a second I thought this was indestructible bacteria accidentally brought
back from a trip to outer-space and was momentarily terrified.

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snoonan
"Life form" subtilely connotes alien life, doesn't it? Especially when you put
it in a sentence with NASA and Spacecraft.

When they discover actual life on Mars and Europa, it's probably going to have
a lot less impact due to the lack of self restraint in using desensitizing
wording like this among journalists (Scientific American??)

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ams6110
Life finds a way.

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jlebrech
does it have dna?

what if it's a branch new genome?

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toufka
It's only 96% similar to other bacteria we know of. Which is greater than the
difference of most mammals to each other. But still pretty similar and not
entirely radical in its genetic makeup (in the grand scheme of things).

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kimonos
Hmmm, I guess the title is a bit confusing. I was expecting a different
article.. But thanks for the info though!

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dekhn
As long as NASA doesn't try to claim this is more evidence for astrobiology
(rather than plain old terrestrial damn-tough bacteria), I'm OK with this.

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nitrogen
Discovering new niches in which life survives gives us more possible
extraterrestrial habitats that could, potentially, also harbor life.

