In mid-March, NASA researchers have announced that they have found an unknown life form aboard the International Space Station. And they were nice to it.
In fact, for an organization familiar with a sophisticated public communications strategy – Mars robbers do not write their own tweets, that’s what I’re saying – everyone was pretty quiet about this discovery.
Almost also quiet.
It is true that the new life, for example, was a xenomorphic alien with acid for blood. It was a new species of bacteria, unknown on earth, but whose genes identified it as coming from a known terrestrial genus called Methylobacterium. Its members usually like to hang out between the roots of plants, not on the walls of space stations. Yet you would think that a microbe that is probably in space probably, but perhaps developed, deserves a little more freaking. Yet we are here. No one was exactly surprised – and the reasons why it could define the future of human spatial exploration.
As part of an ongoing research project on the microbial life of the ISS, astronauts on board crashed different parts of the station in 2015 and 2016 and sent home the wipes they used. Over the next few years here on earth, a team of researchers with their headquarters at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Biotechnology and Planetary Protection Group isolated the microbes and sequenced their genes. One species, found on a HEPA filter in the station’s life support system, was a garden species (literally!) Methylobacterium rhodesianum. But three samples – from a surface near the material research shelf, a wall near the ‘dome’ of windows and the astronauts’ dining table – were something new. The researchers who run the project named it M. ajmalii.
It was not even the first time that these researchers found a new bacterium in space. They have already found a whole other unknown bacterium in the series of ISS samples – they published an article about it in 2017. There is a chance that these bugs are, in a sense, strangers, that they evolved at the station. But it’s thin. Chances are they rode on cargo or on astronauts, and the micro-hunters only noticed them because they went looking. ‘There are undoubtedly chances of evolution in space, but the space station is so young. It’s only 20 years old. Bacteria may not have developed at that time, ”says Kasthuri Venkateswaran, the JPL microbiologist who manages the project.
What’s more interesting is finding out what bacteria zeros are on earth, but heroes in the rare, closed-loop environment of a spaceship. Therefore, studying the microbiome of the International Space Station – the bacteria, fungi and viruses that thrive on board – can be critical to the safety of missions to Mars, or permanent bases in other worlds. As on Earth, human health in space will depend in part on a healthy microbiome and a good relationship with the microbiome of the vessel or shelter. “We can say that new species carried by the crew may have certain characteristics to withstand the conditions there,” says Venkateswaran. ‘The rest might have died. These are the things that survive. ”
Space is real rather unpleasant. Outside of a vessel or vacuum pack, it will be a race to see if you first die of suffocation or freeze-drying. (The high levels of hard radiation are more of a long-term agreement.)
So the inside of those vessels and packs should be closed systems. The only things that come and go are cargo and astronauts. But everywhere people go, they bring their microbes with them – in their intestines, on their skin, in their noses and mouths. This is true in your home, and so is the ISS. But the ISS is not like your home, and not just because it recycles air and water and you can not open the windows. The air on the ISS is drier, with higher levels of carbon dioxide. Radiation levels are higher. There is no gravity to speak of. “We are used to certain types of microbes staying on the floor, but they do not stay on the floor when there is no floor,” said John Rummel, a former NASA planetary protection officer responsible for keeping aliens off Earth. .and the earth lives from other places.) It does not smell so fresh in the ISS, and because it is full of nooks and crannies in which water droplets can float and then get stuck, thanks to the surface tension, it has many places where microbes can hang out .