Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Scientists from Arsenic Bacteria Paper Respond to Criticisms

Backlash from the “arsenic life” paper that was published on December 2, is still ongoing. Some of the criticism has been about the science, while much more criticism has been about the coverage of the news and also how NASA introduced, or “teased” the public with news, using the words “astrobiology” and “extraterrestrial life” in their announcement of an upcoming press conference. Today, at the American Geophysical Union conference, one of the team scientists, Ron Oremland discussed the fallout from the news coverage, and I’ll be providing an overview of that shortly. At about the same time, the science team released a statement and some FAQ’s about the science paper. Below is that statement and the information the science team provided.

Continue reading “Scientists from Arsenic Bacteria Paper Respond to Criticisms”

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Forests Might Be Detectable on Extrasolar Planets

Trees on an alien world? No, a dune field on Mars with sand flows. Credit: NASA/JPL/U of Arizona

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Excitingly, we’ve been able to detect the composition of atmospheres on a handful of planets orbiting other stars. But if next-generation space observatories go online within the next couple of decades, some scientists propose using a new technique to determine details such as tree-like multicellular life on extrasolar planets.

While previous studies have discussed the likelihood of detecting life on exoplanets through signs of biogenic gases in the atmosphere, or seeing “glints” of light off oceans or lakes, those technique are limited in that, for example, biogenic gases could be signs of either single-celled or multicellular life – not providing much detail — and as we’ve seen from Titan, glints off planetary bodies do not necessarily come from water-filled lakes.

Researchers Christopher Doughty and Adam Wolf from the Carnegie Institution propose using a technique that Earth-orbiting satellites already use to in order to determine types of crops and land cover, as well as cloud detection, atmospheric conditions and other applications.

Called Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF), this type of remote sensing determines the causes of differing reflectance at different sun- and view-angles. For example, trees cast shadows on the planet, and the large-scale pattern of shadows would make the light reflected off the vegetation to take on specific brightness and color characteristics.

“BRDF arises from the changing visibility of the shadows cast by objects,” the researchers wrote in their paper, “and the presence of tree-like structures is clearly distinguishable from flat ground with the same reflectance spectrum. We examined whether the BRDF could detect the existence of tree-like structures on an extrasolar planet by using changes in planetary albedo as a planet orbits its star.”

BRDF and different light reflection for various planetary sufaces. Credit: Wolfgang Lucht.

They used a computer model to simulate vegetation reflectance at different planetary phase angles and added both simulated and real cloud cover to calculate the planetary albedo for a vegetated and non-vegetated planet with abundant liquid water.

Depending on how accurately planetary cloud cover can be resolved, as well as the sensitivity instruments on proposed missions such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder, this technique could theoretically detect tree-like multicellular life on exoplanets in about 50 nearby stellar systems.

The angles of the spacecraft, the planet and its sun would have to be taken into account but the team says these characteristics would change in predictable ways over time, producing a detectable pattern.

If vegetation on the exoplanet was wide¬spread enough, it would affect the reflective properties of the whole planet.

“We found that even if the entire planetary albedo were rendered to a single pixel, the rate of increase of albedo as a planet approaches full illumination would be comparatively greater on a vegetated planet than on a non-vegetated planet,” they said.

Doughty and Wolf’s paper appeared in the journal Astrobiology.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

NASA Finds a “Weird” Kind of Life on Earth

Mono Lake in California, with the bacteria (inset) that lives there. Credit: Science

No, NASA has not found life on another planet, but has found life here on Earth that is almost “alien” to our narrow, phosphate-based view of life. Scientists have discovered — or “trained,” actually — a type of bacteria that can live and grow almost entirely on a poison, arsenic, and incorporates it into its DNA. This “weird” form of life, which can use something other than phosphorus — what we think of as a basic building block of life — is quite different from what we think of as life on Earth. It doesn’t directly provide proof of a “shadow biosphere,” a second form of life that lives side-by-side with other life on our planet, but does suggest that the requirements for life’s beginnings and foundations may be more flexible than we thought. This means life elsewhere in the solar system and beyond could arise in a multitude of conditions.

“Our findings are a reminder that life-as-we-know-it could be much more flexible than we generally assume or can imagine,” said Felise Wolfe-Simon, lead author of a new paper in Science. “If something here on Earth can do something so unexpected, what else can life do that we haven’t seen yet?”

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The salt-loving bacteria, strain GFAJ-1 of the Halomonadaceae family of Gammaproteobacteria,came from the toxic and briny Mono Lake, near Yosemite Park in California. The lake has no outlet, so over millennia has become one of the highest natural concentrations of arsenic on Earth.

Although the bacteria did not subsist entirely on arsenic in the lake, the researchers took the bacteria in the lab grew it in Petri dishes in which phosphate salt was gradually replaced by arsenic, until the bacteria could grow without needing phosphate, an essential building block for various macromolecules present in all cells, including nucleic acids, lipids and proteins.

Using radio-tracers, the team closely followed the path of arsenic in the bacteria; from the chemical’s uptake to its incorporation into various cellular components. Arsenic had completely replaced phosphate in the molecules of the bacteria, right down its DNA.

“Life as we know it requires particular chemical elements and excludes others,” said Ariel Anbar, a biogeochemist and astrobiologist from Arizona State University. “But are those the only options? How different could life be? One of the guiding principles in the search for life on other planets, and of our astrobiology program, is that we should ‘follow the elements. Felisa’s study teaches us that we ought to think harder about which elements to follow.”

Felisa Wolfe-Simon, right, a NASA astrobiology research fellow in residence at the USGS, and Ronald Oremland, an expert in arsenic microbiology at the USGS, examine sediment in August 2009 from Mono Lake in eastern California. Credit: Henry Bortman

Wolfe-Simon added, “We took what we do know about the ‘constants’ in biology, specifically that life requires the six elements CHNOPS (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur) in three components, namely DNA, proteins and fats, and used that as a basis to ask experimentally testable hypotheses even here on Earth.”

The idea that arsenic might be a substitute for phosphorus in life on Earth, was proposed by Wolfe-Simon and developed into a collaboration with Anbar and theoretical physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies. Their hypothesis was published in January 2009, in a paper titled “Did nature also choose arsenic?” in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

“We not only hypothesized that biochemical systems analogous to those known today could utilize arsenate in the equivalent biological role as phosphate,” said Wolfe-Simon “but also that such organisms could have evolved on the ancient Earth and might persist in unusual environments today.”

This new research is the first time that shows a microorganism is able to use a toxic chemical to sustain growth and life.

Sources: Science, paper

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Habitable Environments Could Exist Underground on Mars

Possible Phyllosilicate-Rich Area in Syrtis Major. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

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Data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter suggests that there could be habitable environments underground on Mars – in the past, and perhaps even today. Scientists discovered evidence of long-sought-after hydrothermally altered carbonate-bearing rocks which were once deep within the Red Planet, exposed within an impact crater. “Carbonate rocks have long been a Holy Grail of Mars exploration for several reasons,” said Joseph Michalski from the Planetary Science Institute. He explained that on Earth, carbonates form with the ocean and within lakes, so the same could be true for ancient Mars. “Such deposits could indicate past seas that were once present on Mars. Another reason is because we suspect that the ancient Martian atmosphere was probably denser and CO2-rich, but today the atmosphere is quite thin so we infer that the CO2 must have gone into carbonate rocks somewhere on Mars.”

This unique mineralogy was spotted within the central peak of a crater to the southwest of a giant Martian volcanic province named Syrtis Major. With infrared spectra from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), planetary geologists detected the hydrothermal minerals from their spectroscopic fingerprints. Visible images from the HiRISE camera (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) on board MRO show that the carbonates and hydrated silicate minerals occur within deformed bedrock that was exhumed by an ancient meteor impact that poked through the volcanic upper crust of Mars.

The carbonate-bearing rocks were once likely about 6 km (about 4 miles) underground. The carbonate minerals exist along with hydrated silicate minerals of a likely hydrothermal origin.

Syrtis Major Planum Channel and Depression. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

While this is not the first detection of carbonates on Mars, Michalski said, “This detection is significant because it shows other carbonates detected by previous workers, which were found in a fairly limited spatial extent, were not a localized phenomenon. Carbonates may have formed over a very large region of ancient Mars, but been covered up by volcanic flows later in the history of the planet. A very exciting history of water on Mars may be simply covered up by younger lava!”

The discovery also has implications for the habitability of the Martian crust. “The presence of carbonates along with hydrothermal silicate minerals indicates that a hydrothermal system existed in the presence of CO2 deep in the Martian crust,” Michalski says. “Such an environment is chemically similar to the type of hydrothermal systems that exist within the ocean floor of Earth, which are capable of sustaining vast communities of organisms that have never seen the light of day.

“The cold, dry surface of Mars is a tough place to survive, even for microbes. If we can identify places where habitable environments once existed at depth, protected from the harsh surface environment, it is a big step forward for astrobiological exploration of the red planet.”

Michalski and co-author Paul B. Niles of NASA Johnson Space Center recently published the results in a paper titled “Deep crustal carbonate rocks exposed by meteor impact on Mars” in Nature Geoscience.

Source: Planetary Science Institute, Nature Geoscience

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Titan’s Atmosphere Could Produce Building Blocks of Life

Titan's thick haze. Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

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Saturn’s moon Titan has long been thought to be an analog of early Earth, and a recent experiment demonstrates that amino acids and nucleotide bases — which are the basic building blocks of life on Earth – could very easily be under production in Titan’s hazy atmosphere. “Our intention was to figure out what goes on in Titan’s atmosphere using high resolution mass spectrometry,” said Sarah Horst, from the University of Arizona, a member of an international team conducting the research. “We found there could be a high number of some incredibly complex molecules being created.”

Two recent exciting discoveries led the team to try and find out more about Titan’s atmosphere: first, the discovery of high energy oxygen ions flowing into Titan’s atmosphere, and second, that there are high heavy molecular ions in the atmosphere – neither of which were expected.

“When you put two discoveries together, that leads us to possibility that oxygen can get incorporated into these large molecules and in turn, that may be incorporated into life,” Horst said in press briefing at the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences meeting this week.

The intense radiation that hits the top of Titan’s thick atmosphere is capable of breaking apart even very stable molecules. The international team wanted to understand what happens as these molecules are broken apart in the atmosphere.

Working with a team in France, Horst, a graduate student, and her professor Roger Yelle, filled a reaction chamber with Titan-like atmosphere, (a cold plasma consisting of nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide), and infused radio-frequency radiation as an energy source.

“What happens is that aerosols form in levitation — they float while forming — so this probably is very representative of Titan’s atmosphere,” Horst said. “We end up with really cool looking aerosols that have very similar sizes to aerosols that are inferred in Titan’s atmosphere.”

The molecules discovered in the aerosols include the five nucleotide bases used by life on Earth (cytosine, adenine, thymine, guanine and uracil) and the two smallest amino acids, glycine and alanine.

“The experiment showed that Titan’s atmosphere is capable of producing extremely complex molecules and has the potential for producing molecules that are important for life on Earth,” Horst said, but tempered her statement by adding, “however, this doesn’t mean there is life on Titan.”

She said if there were life on Titan, mostly likely it would use molecules that life on Earth would not use, as due to lack of liquid water, life would be completely different.

“But this tells that it is possible to make very complex molecules in the outer parts of an atmosphere,” Horst said. “We don’t need liquid water, we don’t need a surface.”

This also provides another option to how life may have started on Earth. The two main theories for how life began on Earth is that it was brought here by comets or asteroids or that it formed from a primordial soup zapped to life from lightning. But it may have formed from a primordial haze high in Earth’s atmosphere.
“This helps us to understand what processes began life on Earth and what could be happening on other exoplanets in the galaxy,” Horst said.

Source: DPS briefing

Posted on by Jerry Coffey

Is There Life On Other Planets

Temperature of Mars
What is the Temperature of Mars? Image credit: NASA/JPL

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Is there life on other planets? That has been a question raised from the early beginnings of science fiction. The notion was scoffed at as pure mind play for dreamers and the occasional grifter selling rides to the Moon. At least it was until we were able to reach into space and discover new facts and gather new intel.

The possibility of life on Mars(outside sci-fi books) had been proposed as early as the 1950’s, but there was no real way to prove or disprove the theory until the launch of Mariner 4 in 1965. The spacecraft was able to return the first photographs of the planet’s surface. The news was all bad for those who had hoped for signs of life on the planet. The surface was too extreme and desolate for any type of known life form. The Voyager probes found radiolabeled carbon dioxide, but no organic molecules. Those results give mixed signals and are inconclusive at best. The results have been used to support the possibility of a microorganism named Gillevinia straata.

The Phoenix lander touched down on the Martian surface in May of 2008. The lander dug a trench on the area of the northern pole. No bacteria was found but the samples did contain bound water and carbon dioxide. The most positive evidence of life in the Martian past are meteorites from the planet. 34 exist and 3 show signs of microscopic fossilized bacteria.

Another viable possibility for life on other planets would be those similar to Gliese 581c. These planets are within the habitable zone(for human life) of their main sequence star. These planets appear to have a temperature that would allow liquid water and atmosphere’s that seem spectroscopically close to Earth’s. The information that is needed would detail the greenhouse effect on these planets. If that was available, we would be able to determine suitability for human life.

All of our efforts to answer the question ‘Is there life on other planets?’ are based on finding life that is similar to that on Earth. That is a typically arrogant line of research. Where is it written that the Earth type of life form is pervasive?

We have written many articles about the possibility of life on other planets for Universe Today. Here’s an article about the life on other planets, and here’s an article about life on Mars.

If you’d like more info on the search for life on other planets, check out the NASA Astrobiology Institute Homepage, and here’s a link to NASA Planet Quest: Finding Life.

We’ve also recorded an entire episode of Astronomy Cast all about the Future of Astronomy. Listen here, Episode 188: The Future of Astronomy.

Posted on by Ryan Anderson

Ice Caves Possible on Mars

The circular black features in this 2007 figure are caves formed by the collapse of lava tubes on Mars. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/USGS

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New results published in the journal Icarus suggest that caves on Mars may provide future astronauts with more than just shelter. In many locations, even far from the poles, the caves may actually trap water ice.

Ice caves are made of rock, but they contain ice year-round. (Not to be confused with glacier caves, which are caves made of ice!) Ice caves can be found on the Earth even where surface temperatures are above freezing for months at a time. This happens because cold winter air sinks into the cave and is trapped, but during the summer, the circulation in the cave shuts off: it is full of dense cold air so the warm air outside can’t get in.

Now, in a study led by Kaj Williams of NASA Ames, scientists have used simulations of the global climate and assumptions about the thermal properties of the surface to figure out where on Mars similar cold-trapping might occur. Their results show that a significant portion of the martian surface has the right conditions for ice to accumulate in caves.

Even more tantalizing, the huge volcanic provinces of Tharsis and Elysium look to be particularly good at accumulating ice. This is important because caves formed by collapsing lava tubes have been seen on the flanks of these volcanoes. Lava tube caves on Earth tend to have limited air circulation, making them good candidates for ice accumulation.

Astronauts on the surface of Mars will likely need to take cover underground to avoid the harsh radiation environment of the surface. Natural caves such as lava tubes have been suggested as ideal ready-made shelters for astronauts, and they are only looking better. Not only could ice caves provide water as a resource, the ice could preserve valuable records of past climate cycles, and the caves may be important habitats for past or present martian life.

Williams and his team plan to continue refining their models, particularly focusing on the Tharsis and Elysium regions, using higher-resolution atmospheric models and more  precise geologic data to pinpoint areas that are best for cave-ice formation.

Ice formations in a terrestrial ice cave in Montenegro. © copyright by Jack Brauer.
Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Alien Life on Titan? Hang on Just a Minute…

This artist concept shows a mirror-smooth lake on the surface of the smoggy moon Titan. Image credit: NASA/JPL

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Two papers released last week detailing oddities found on Titan have blown the top off the ‘jumping to conclusions’ meter, and following media reports of NASA finding alien life on Saturn’s hazy moon, scientists are now trying to put a little reality back into the news. “Everyone: Calm down!” said Cassini imaging team leader Carolyn Porco on Twitter over the weekend. “It is by NO means certain that microbes are eating hydrogen on Titan. Non-bio explanations are still possible.” Porco also put out a statement on Monday saying such reports were “the unfortunate result of a knee-jerk rush to sensationalize an exciting but rather complex, nuanced and emotionally-charged issue.”

Astrobiologist Chris McKay told Universe Today that life on Titan is “certainly the most exciting, but it’s not the simplest explanation for all the data we’re seeing.”

McKay suggests everyone needs to take the Occam’s Razor approach, where the simplest theory that fits the facts of a problem is the one that should be selected.

The two papers suggest that hydrogen and acetylene are being depleted at the surface of Titan. The first paper by Darrell Strobel shows hydrogen molecules flowing down through Titan’s atmosphere and disappearing at the surface. This is a disparity between the hydrogen densities that flow down to the surface at a rate of about 10,000 trillion trillion hydrogen molecules per second, but none showing up at the surface.

“It’s as if you have a hose and you’re squirting hydrogen onto the ground, but it’s disappearing,” Strobel said. “I didn’t expect this result, because molecular hydrogen is extremely chemically inert in the atmosphere, very light and buoyant. It should ‘float’ to the top of the atmosphere and escape.”

The other paper (link not yet available) led by Roger Clark, a Cassini team scientist, maps hydrocarbons on Titan’s surface and finds a surprising lack of acetylene. Models of Titan’s upper atmosphere suggest a high level of acetylene in Titan’s lakes, as high as 1 percent by volume. But this study, using the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) aboard Cassini, found very little acetylene on Titan’s surface.

Of course, one explanation for both discoveries is that something on Titan is consuming the hydrogen and acetylene.

Even though both findings are important, McKay feels the crux of any possible life on Titan hinges on verifying Strobel’s discovery about the lack of hydrogen.

“To me, the whole thing hovers on this determination of whether there is this flux of hydrogen is real,” McKay said via phone. “The acetylene has been missing and the ethane has been missing, but that certainly doesn’t generate a lot of excitement, because how much is supposed to be there depends on how much is being made. There are a lot of uncertainties.”

McKay stressed both results are still preliminary and the hydrogen loss in particular is the result of a computer calculation, and not a direct measurement. “It is the result of a computer simulation designed to fit measurements of the hydrogen concentration in the lower and upper atmosphere in a self-consistent way,” he said in a statement he put out over the weekend. “It is not presently clear from Strobel’s results how dependent his conclusion of a hydrogen flux into the surface is on the way the computer simulation is constructed or on how accurately it simulates the Titan chemistry.”

However, the findings are interesting for astrobiology, and would require the actual existence of methane-based life, a theory McKay himself proposed five years ago, which he described today as an “odd idea.”

In 2005, McKay and Heather Smith (McKay and Smith, 2005) suggested that methane-based life (rather than water-based) called methanogens on Titan could consume hydrogen, acetylene, and ethane. The key conclusion of that paper was “The results of the recent Huygens probe could indicate the presence of such life by anomalous depletions of acetylene and ethane as well as hydrogen at the surface.”

Even though the two new papers seem to show evidence for all three of these on Titan, McKay said this is a still a long way from “evidence of life”. However, it is extremely interesting.

But what does McKay really think?

“Unfortunately, if I was betting, the most likely explanation is that Darrel’s (Strobel) results are wrong and that further analysis will show there is another explanation for the data he is trying to fit, besides the strong flux of hydrogen into the surface. I would be very happy if we did confirm all that data, but we do have to take it in steps.”

McKay provided four possibilities for the recently reported findings, listed in order of their likely reality:

1. The determination that there is a strong flux of hydrogen into the surface is mistaken. “It will be interesting to see if other researchers, in trying to duplicate Strobel’s results, reach the same conclusion,” McKay said.

2. There is a physical process that is transporting H2 from the upper atmosphere into the lower atmosphere. One possibility is adsorption onto the solid organic atmospheric haze particles which eventually fall to the ground. However this would be a flux of H2, and not a net loss of H2.

3. If the loss of hydrogen at the surface is correct, the non-biological explanation requires that there be some sort of surface catalyst, presently unknown, that can mediate the hydrogenation reaction at 95 K, the temperature of the Titan surface. “That would be quite interesting and a startling find although not as startling as the presence of life,” McKay said.

4. The depletion of hydrogen, acetylene, and ethane, is due to a new type of liquid-methane based life form as predicted (Benner et al. 2004, McKay and Smith 2005, and Schulze-Makuch and Grinspoon 2005 (Astrobiology, vol. 5, no. 4., p. 560-567.).

McKay said if further analysis shows that a strong flux of hydrogen into the surface really is happening, “then my first two explanations are no longer options and we are then left with two really quite remarkable alternatives, either there is some mysterious metalysis going on, which at 95 k is really hard to imagine, and would have enormous implications for things like chemical engineering. And the second alternative is that there is life, which is even more amazing.”

“So to make process on this,” McKay continued, “we have to confirm Darrel’s result that there is hydrogen being fluxed onto the surface of Titan, that is really way unexpected, and unfortunately, it constitutes extraordinary claims that need extraordinary evidence. Darrel’s paper is just a first step in that.”

What does McKay think about the rash of media reports claiming life on Titan?

“Well, I think it reflects our human fascination and desire to find life out there,” he said. “We want it to be true. When we’re given a set of facts, if they are consistent with biology we jump to that explanation first. The most biologically interesting explanation is the first one we look to. We ought to give that a name — something like ‘Carl Sagan’s Razor’ as opposed to ‘Occam’s Razor,’ which would say that ‘The most exciting explanation is assumed to be true until it is proven false.'”

You can read all of McKay’s written response on the CICLOPS website, which Porco said will be “the first installment in a new feature on the CICLOPS website, called ‘Making Sense of the News’, where from time to time, scientists, both involved in Cassini and not, will be invited to comment on new developments that bear on the exploration of the solar system and the study of planetary systems, including our own.”

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Are We Contaminating Mars?

A new image from the HiRISE camera on MRO showing mounds of south polar layered deposits. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

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With Mars seemingly the destination of choice in NASA’s future, researchers are taking a look at what kinds of things we want to bring with us when we go to Mars. But also, just as important is what we don’t want to take with us. A new study by the University of Central Florida reveals that bacteria common to spacecraft may be able to survive the harsh environment of Mars long enough to inadvertently contaminate the Red Planet with terrestrial life. So, if we do find life on Mars, the question might be: is it them, or is it us?

The research team replicated Mars-like conditions, such as a very dry environment, low barometric pressure, cold temperatures and intense UV radiation. They exposed one of our favorite bacteria, E. coli (Escherichia coli) – which is a potential spacecraft contaminant– to these conditions for a week, and found it likely would survive but not grow on the surface of Mars if it were shielded from UV irradiation, such as in nooks and crannies in a spacecraft, or even if it was covered by thin layers of dust.

“If long-term microbial survival is possible on Mars, then past and future explorations of Mars may provide the microbial inoculum (biological materials) for seeding Mars with terrestrial life,” said the researchers. “Thus, a diversity of microbial species should be studied to characterize their potential for long term survival on Mars.”

Even though NASA and other space agencies do sterilize spacecraft in an effort to reduce the chance of contamination to other bodies in our solar system, recent studies have shown that microbial species are likely still hitching a ride. And in what might be a more-harm-than-good scenario, the sterile nature of spacecraft assembly facilities ensures that only the most resilient species survive, including acinetobacter, bacillus, escherichia, staphylococcus and streptococcus. So we’re likely sending the worst of the worst kinds of bacteria, at least by human standards.

This research was published in the April 2010 issue of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Source: American Society for Microbiology

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Life on Titan Could Be Smelly and Explosive

Artist concept of Methane-Ethane lakes on Titan (Credit: Copyright 2008 Karl Kofoed). Click for larger version.

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Could there be life on Titan? If so, one astrobiologist says humans probably couldn’t be in the same room with a Titanian and live to tell about it. “Hollywood would have problems with these aliens” said Dr. William Bains. “Beam one onto the Starship Enterprise and it would boil and then burst into flames, and the fumes would kill everyone in range. Even a tiny whiff of its breath would smell unbelievably horrible. But I think it is all the more interesting for that reason. Wouldn’t it be sad if the most alien things we found in the galaxy were just like us, but blue and with tails?”

While giving an obvious nod to the recent movie “Avatar,” Bains’ research provides insight to the difficulties we might encounter – beyond cultural – if we ever meet up with alien life. There could be unintended harmful consequences for one species, or both.

Bains is working to find out just how extreme the chemistry of life can be. Life on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, represents one of the more bizarre scenarios being studied. While images sent back by the Cassini/Huygens mission might make Titan look Earth-like and maybe even inviting, it has a thick atmosphere of frozen, orange smog. At ten times our distance from the Sun, it is a frigid place, with a surface temperature of -180 degrees Celsius. Water is permanently frozen into ice and the only liquid available is liquid methane and ethane.

So instead of water based-life (like us), life on Titan would likely be based on methane.

“Life needs a liquid; even the driest desert plant on Earth needs water for its metabolism to work. So, if life were to exist on Titan, it must have blood based on liquid methane, not water. That means its whole chemistry is radically different. The molecules must be made of a wider variety of elements than we use, but put together in smaller molecules. It would also be much more chemically reactive,” said Bains.

Additionally, Bains said a metabolism running in liquid methane would have to be built of smaller molecules than terrestrial biochemistry.

“Terrestrial life uses about 700 molecules, but to find the right 700 there is reason to suppose that you need to be able to make 10 million or more,” Bains said. “The issue is not how many molecules you can make, but whether you can make the collection you need to assemble a metabolism.”

Bains said doing such assembling is like trying to find bits of wood in a lumber-yard to make a table.

“In theory you only need 5,” he said. “But you may have a lumber-yard full of offcuts and still not find exactly the right five that fit together. So you need the potential to make many more molecules than you actually need. Thus the 6-atom chemicals on Titan would have to include much more diverse bond types and probably more diverse elements, including sulphur and phosphorus in much more diverse and (to us) unstable forms, and other elements such as silicon.”

Energy is another factor that would affect the type of life that could evolve on Titan. With Sunlight a tenth of a percent as intense on Titan’s surface as on the surface of Earth, energy is likely to be in short supply.

“Rapid movement or growth needs a lot of energy, so slow-growing, lichen-like organisms are possible in theory, but velociraptors are pretty much ruled out,” said Bains.

Whatever life may be on Titan, at least we know there won’t be a Jurassic Park.

Bains, whose research is carried out through Rufus Scientific in Cambridge, UK, and MIT in the USA, is presenting his research at the National Astronomy Meeting in Glasgow, Scotland on April 13, 2010.

Source: RAS NAM