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From: Stig Agermose <Stig_Agermose@online.pol.dk>
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1998 02:04:44 +0200
Fwd Date: Tue, 01 Sep 1998 07:41:10 -0400
Subject: Earth Microbes On The Moon


Excerpt of NASA news. The page is impossible to render in
txt-format, but this is the URL

http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast01sep98_1.htm

Stig

*******

Earth microbes on the moon=BF

Three decades after Apollo 12, a remarkable colony of lunar
survivors revisited

September 1, 1998: For a human, unprotected space travel is a
short trip measured in seconds.


What could be worse for would-be space travelers than a
catastrophic breach in their protective spacesuits, the
high-tech, multilayered fabric blanket that balloons under the
pressure of a life-saving flow of oxygen and insulates against
the frozen harshness of deep-space vacuum?

But for some kinds of microbes, the harshness of space travel is
not unlike their everyday stressful existence, the successful
execution of ingenious survival tricks learned over billions of
years of Earth-bound evolution.

(Click the image at right for a synopsis (below) of astrobiology
at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.)


Forthcoming anniversary


Space historians will recall that the journey to the stars has
more than one life form on its passenger list: the names of a
dozen Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon and one
inadvertent stowaway, a common bacteria, Streptococcus mitis,
the only known survivor of unprotected space travel. As Marshall
astronomers and biologists met recently to discuss biological
limits to life on Earth, the question of how an Earth bacteria
could survive in a vacuum without nutrients, water and radiation
protection was less speculative than might first be imagined. A
little more than a month before the forthcoming millennium
celebration,=BFNASA will mark without fanfare the thirty year
anniversary of documenting a microbe's first successful journey
from Earth.


Apollo 12 remembered


In 1991, as Apollo 12 Commander Pete Conrad reviewed the
transcripts of his conversations relayed from the moon back to
Earth, the significance of the only known microbial survivor of
harsh interplanetary travel struck him as profound:

"I always thought the most significant thing that we ever
found=BFon the whole...Moon was that little bacteria who came back
and lived and nobody ever said [anything] about it."=BF

(Left: Astronaut Pete Conrad (photographed by crew mate Alan
Bean) inspects Surveyor 3's camera assembly. Surveyor 3 landed
on the moon on April 20, 1967, at 2.94=95 S, 23.34=95 W in Oceanus
Procellarum.On Nov. 12, 1969, Conrad and Bean piloted the Apollo
12 Lunar Module (background) to a landing 156 m (512 ft) away.)

Although the space-faring microbe was described in a 1970
Newsweek article, along with features in Sky and Telescope and
Aviation Week and Space Technology, the significance of a living
organism surviving for nearly three years in the harsh lunar
environment may only now be placed in perspective, after three
decades of the biological revolution in understanding life and
its favored conditions. As the lunar voyagers answered a similar
question more than a century ago, in Jules Verne's classic, From
the Earth to the Moon: "To those who maintain that the planets
are not inhabited one may reply:=BFYou might be perfectly in the
right, if you could only show that the earth is the best
possible world."=BF

The remarkable lunar survivor from Apollo 12 thus gives
scientific pause. 


Three decades, the biological revolution


To a biologist, freeze-drying microbes for harsh space travel
conjures up rather mundane kitchen science, a simple reenactment
of how a yeast packet taken from the freezer can make bread
dough rise prior to baking. But to a new breed of biologist
exploring the harshest conditions on Earth, how a delicate
microbe manages to counteract vacuum, boiling temperatures,
burning radiation, and crushing pressures deep in the frozen
icecaps is the study of life itself.=BF

For example, only now after 30 years of biological progress can
scientists begin to scan down the genetic script underlying the
causes of malaria, syphilis, cholera and tuberculosis. Within a
few years, it is estimated that 50 to 100 complete genomes of
living organisms will be entirely deciphered, presenting the
first opportunities for deep evolutionary comparisons and
insights into exactly the remarkable means by which the common
Strep. bacteria could revive itself after 2.6 years on the moon.

(Left: Interior view of Surveyor 3 TV camera; surviving
microorganisms cultured from the polyurethane foam insulation (1
mL) covering the circuit boards (upper left).)