Paul Gilster follows up on a story I first saw at MSNBC describing how microbial life can make the iciest and most inhospitable places home. Project SLIce (Signatures of Life in Ice) studies how organic material might behave on other worlds by studying here it on Earth - and it's yielded some useful information.
An early SLIce result, described at the Goldschmidt2009 geochemistry
meeting in Davos last week: The best place to look for microorganisms
in ice is in the layers close to the surface. That’s good to know,
because a planetary rover is going to be able to sample such
environments much more readily than those several meters beneath. Also
helpful is the team’s discovery that cleaning the rover’s sample scoop
is harder than it looks, leaving dead micro-organisms on it even after
it had apparently been sterilized. New procedures have resolved the
problem, ensuring we don’t inadvertently ‘discover’ Earth organisms
that have found their way along for the ride.
Wayne
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