Russia blasting biomass at Martian moons
While the Western world waits to see what President-Elect Obama does with the US space program, the Russians are getting busy with a Mars mission of their own. Due for launch in October, the charmingly-named Phobos-Grunt mission will be robot-manned, of course, but there will be earth lifeforms aboard, albeit very tiny ones:
LIFE [Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment] is intended to help better understand the nature of life, its robustness, and its ability – or not – to move between planets. The journey will be a test of one facet of the “transpermia” hypothesis. That is, the possibility that life can voyage from planet to planet inside rocks blasted off one planetary surface by impact, to land on another planetary surface.
Don’t worry, though; they’re not going to break the 1967 Outer Space Treaty by infecting Mars with Earth biology. Or at least they’re not going to do it deliberately – but that’s not stopping a few NASA types getting a bit hot under the collar about the whole business:
… I am uncomfortable with sending native tundra samples so close to Mars, because this is a location on Earth that could possibly contain organisms capable of adapting to Martian conditions,” and to do so “seems ill-advised,” Conley told SPACE.com.
Well, we surely don’t want to corrupt Mars with Earth microbes if we can avoid it. But how much of that discomfort is rooted in the Planetary Society using a Russian mission arther than a NASA one, I wonder? [superb montage image by Bluedharma]
January 9th, 2009 at 7:39 am
If I could, I’d crashed a cargo of a few dozen bottles filled with a mix of aqlgae, fungoids, slimes and stuff on Mars.
January 9th, 2009 at 11:34 am
If I could, I’d throw tens of tons of the stuff at Mars.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
If I could, I’d throw ya all at Mars.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
If I could, I’d throw Mars at all y’all…;-)
January 9th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Earth life could damage God’s intelligent design for Mars. Oh no!
January 12th, 2009 at 2:13 am
We need their oil and assorted rare earths. Ecosystemic genocide is totally okay in these circumstances, gaiz.